Echoes Across Time: A Century of Modern Chinese Literary Translation

About the event

This talk re-examines the historiography of modern Chinese literary translation, arguing that translation was not peripheral to literary modernisation but constitutive of it. Rather than accepting linear accounts that cast translation as a one-way vehicle of Western influence or cultural borrowing, it treats translation as a historically embedded practice of mediation through which literary hierarchies were reorganised, aesthetic norms redefined, and debates over national identity reframed.

From the late Qing reform era and the May Fourth movement through the Republican period, the socialist decades, and the reform era after 1978, translation assumed shifting yet structurally significant roles within China’s literary field. The talk traces these transformations by attending to historically situated reading practices and to the power asymmetries that shaped cross-cultural exchange.

Integrating textual analysis with institutional history, it shows how genres such as realist fiction, revolutionary literature, and modernist poetry entered the Chinese literary system at distinct historical junctures, and how authors ranging from Dickens to Sartre were re-contextualised to serve evolving aesthetic and ideological agendas.

By situating translation within the institutional frameworks of publishing, education, and state cultural policy, the lecture demonstrates that translation not only responded to historical change but also actively mediated it. Translators emerge as agents working within constraint—negotiating fidelity and adaptation, innovation and regulation—while contributing to the reconfiguration of literary authority and canon formation.

By focusing on mediation rather than influence and on institutional practice rather than abstract exchange, this talk makes a case that translation was not marginal to modern Chinese literary history but central to it — one of the main mechanisms through which literary modernity and national culture were built, contested, and rebuilt.

About the speaker

Yifeng Sun is Chair Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of English at the University of Macau. He is the former Vice President of the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies, and Honorary Professor and Distinguished Visitor at the University of Queensland. Previously, he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.

Professor Sun is also Editor-in-Chief of Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation (John Benjamins) and serves on the editorial boards of Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies (Routledge), Asia Pacific Interdisciplinary Translation Studies (Tsinghua UP), and Chinese Translators Journal (Translators Association of China).

His research interests include translation theory, translation criticism, intercultural studies, comparative literature, English & American literature and literary theory. He has published several monographs on translation studies, cross-cultural communication, British literature and comparative literature.

How to attend

This event is open to all, and free to attend. No registration is necessary, just come along.

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