Asian Studies Seminar Series: Jane Qian Liu

About the event

In Yan Ge’s debut English work, Elsewhere (2023), quite a few short stories centre on characters with Chinese heritage. These characters occasionally speak in Chinese, either to their Chinese friends and family, or to people who do not understand Chinese at all. Often, these Chinese words, written in pinyin, are not translated, but they can nevertheless carry significant weight in the plot development of the stories, or even in the creation of emotional climaxes. By leaving these words untranslated, Yan Ge challenges her Anglophone readers to take action so as to make sense of both the words and the world in which the characters live.

Similarly, in the short stories of Elaine Chiew, collected in the anthology The Heartsick Diaspora (2020), there are frequent references to East Asian languages, including Mandarin, Hokkien, and Japanese. While some of these words are followed by quick translations, often, and especially in dialogues, they remain untranslated. Like the untranslated words in Yan Ge’s works, they create a sense of disruption in the reading experience which forces the readers to find their own way through the labyrinth that is language.

Professor Jane Qian Liu will argue that the use of untranslated words is a strategy to probe the profound link between language and identity, between words and experience, and to explore the multifaceted meaning of living in diaspora, or in Yan Ge’s words, of living “elsewhere”.

About the speaker

Jane Qian Liu is Associate Professor of Translation and Chinese Studies and Head of Translation and Transcultural Studies at University of Warwick. She completed her DPhil in Oriental Studies at University of Oxford, and taught for four years at Beijing Normal University. She also taught modern and contemporary Chinese literature at the University of British Columbia before joining Warwick.

She has published in English and in Chinese on modern Chinese literature, translation studies, and comparative literature, including 'Transcultural Lyricism: Translation, Intertextuality, and the Rise of Emotion in Modern Chinese Love Fiction, 1899-1925' (Brill, 2017), of which the Chinese version is coming out by Peking University Press later this year. She has recently completed her second English monograph which examines the obsession with translation in early twentieth-century China. She is associate editor of Comparative Literature & World Literature. She has also published short stories and novellas in English and Chinese.

How to attend

This event is free to attend and open to all. No registration is required, simply turn up on the day.

Are you interested in studying with us?

We are the only university in Scotland to offer full undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes in both Chinese and Japanese, as well as postgraduate programmes in Korean Studies and East Asian Studies.