This study draws on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the international circulation of ideas to examine the sociological formation process of a translation. Taking the translated Chinese novel Border Town as an example, this study investigates the three phases of that process: selection; labeling and classification; and reading and reception. It discovers that the first two phases have created favorable conditions for the reception of the translated novel, but the translation was not well received. This article argues that the reception of a translation depends on the success of every phase of the sociological formation process. The reception of a translation is constructed and consecrated through the joint efforts of different agents in each phase. Only through a holistic sociological consideration of the dynamics of the formation process can we reach a real understanding of the reception of a translated work.
2013 “Translation and the international circulation of literature.” The Translator 19(2): 157–81.
Boll, Tom
2016 “Penguin books and the translation of Spanish and Latin American poetry, 1956–1979.” Translation and Literature 25(1): 28–57.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1993The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1999 “The social conditions of the international circulation of ideas.” In Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. by Richard Shusterman, 220–28. Oxford: Blackwell.
Buzelin, Hélène
2007 “Translations ‘in the making.’” In Constructing a Sociology of Translation, ed. by Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari, 135–70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
(eds)1947The Chinese Earth: Stories by Shen Congwen. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.
Casanova, Pascale
2004The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Doyle, Michael Scott
1991 “The place of literary translation in American higher education.” Translation Review 36–37(1): 16–21.
Gentzler, Edwin
2002 “Translation, poststructuralism, and power.” In Translation and Power, ed. by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, 195–218. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Gentzler, Edwin and Maria Tymoczko
2002 “Introduction.” In Translation and Power, ed. by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, xi–xxviii. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Gouanvic, Jean-Marc
2005 “A Bourdieusian theory of translation, or the coincidence of practical instances: Field, ‘habitus,’ capital and ‘illusio.’” The Translator 11(2): 147–66.
Gouanvic, Jean-Marc
2010 “Outline of a sociology of translation informed by the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu.” MonTI 21: 119–29.
Gunn, Edward M.
2013 “US scholarship on modern Chinese literature.” In A Scholarly Review of Chinese Studies in North America, ed. by Haihui Zhang, Zhaohui Xue, Shuyong Jiang, and Gary Lance Lugar, 344–76. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies.
Hsia, C. T.
1961/1999A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hsia, C. T.
1988 “Classical Chinese literature: Its reception today as a product of traditional culture.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 10(1/2): 133–52.
2005 “The sociology of Bourdieu and the construction of the ‘object’ in translation and interpreting studies.” The Translator 11(2): 125–45.
Kershaw, Angela
2010 “Sociology of literature, sociology of translation: The reception of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française in France and Britain.” Translation Studies 3(1): 1–16.
Kinkley, Jeffrey
1983 “The Chinese Earth. By Shen Ts’ung-Wen. Translated by Ching Ti and Robert Payne. New York: Columbia University Press, Morningside Edition, 1982.” The Journal of Asian Studies 42(3): 637–39.
Kinkley, Jeffrey
1987The Odyssey of Shen Congwen. Standford: Stanford University Press.
Kinkley, Jeffrey
(ed)1995Imperfect Paradise: Stories by Shen Congwen. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Kinkley, Jeffrey
(trans)2009Border Town: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Kinkley, Jeffrey
2014 “English translations of Shen Congwen’s masterwork, Biancheng (Border Town).” Asian and African Studies 23(1): 37–59.
Kroll, Paul W.
2002 “Reflections on recent anthologies of Chinese literature in translation.” The Journal of Asian Studies 61(3): 985–99.
Liu, Lydia
1997 “Imperfect Paradise: Stories by Shen Congwen (review).” China Review International 4(1): 250–52.
Marinetti, Cristina and Margaret Rose
2013 “Process, practice and landscapes of reception: An ethnographic study of theatre translation.” Translation Studies 6(2): 166–82.
2008 “The translators’ personae: Marketing translatorial images as pursuit of capital.” Meta 53(3): 609–22.
Shan, Te-hsing
2012 “Text, context, and dual contextualization: Personal reflections on a thick translation of Gulliver’s Travels.” In China and its Others: Knowledge Transfer through Translation, 1829–2010, ed. by James St. André and Peng Hsiao-yen. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Shen, Congwen
2004Beautiful Xiangxi: A Photographic Journey of Hunan through the Pen of Shen Congwen. Pleasantville, NY: Reader’s Digest.
2010 “Translation ‘going social’? Challenges to the (Ivory) Tower of Babel.” MonTI 21: 29–46.
Wolf, Michaela
2011 “Mapping the field: Sociological perspectives on translation.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2071: 1–28.
Xu, Minhui
2012 “On scholar translators in literary translation: A case study of Kinkley’s translation of ‘Biancheng.’” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 20(2): 151–63.
Xu, Minhui
2013English Translations of Shen Congwen’s Stories: A Narrative Perspective. Bern: Peter Lang.
(trans)1981The Border Town and Other Stories. Beijing: Chinese Literature Press.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Jazini, Alireza
2021. Translation policy. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 7:3 ► pp. 339 ff.
Valdeón, Roberto A. & Youbin Zhao
2020. Literary translation research in China. Perspectives 28:5 ► pp. 645 ff.
Zheng, Jianwei & Wenjun Fan
2021. Different processes for translating expressive versus informative texts? A computer-assisted study of professionals’ English–Chinese translation. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36:3 ► pp. 782 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 november 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.