Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Online First

Chinese painting is a foreign other to the Anglo-American world. This article explores how Chinese thinking on painting is translated into English and what implications it carries for the English translation of Chinese traditional culture in general. Early Chinese Texts on Painting, an academic book targeting academics and China enthusiasts, is taken as a case study. Using the notion of cultural translation as a theoretical foundation, this study finds that three strategies are used to translate Chinese painting into English: pluralizing meanings of key notions, contextualizing otherness through the recurrence of Taoist, Confucian, and Chinese literary ideas, and restructuring temporal and thematic ideas. These findings imply that cultural authenticity of foreign otherness can be approximated despite temporal, cultural, and linguistic distances. This study seeks to provide new answers to generic questions about the role of language in cross-cultural studies.

The present article is a function-oriented case study within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies, as developed by Gideon Toury, which posits translations as facts in the target culture where they interact with other works and influence them. The present article argues that a translation can have an impact on its translator whose relationship with the target culture is ambivalent. The British missionary Timothy Richard and his Chinese translation of Looking Backward is the case under investigation. Richard played multiple roles in late Qing China. He was a reformer as well as a missionary. His translation of Looking Backward influenced his own reform ideas, which in turn influenced the reformists in late Qing China.