Contemporary Chinese Women Writers in English Translation: An Agent-oriented Investigation

Abstract

According to the translation database “Three Percent,” established at the University of Rochester to collect data on international literature, texts written by women from 2008 to 2018 constitute only 28.7 percent of all the translations in the database, consisting of some 1,394 titles out of a total of 4,849. As translated literature makes up a limited fraction of the books in the Anglophone market, translated literature written by women can be defined as a minority within a minority. According to Josh Stenberg, when selecting Chinese literature for translation, Anglophone publishers tend to “slant towards the male, the racy, the overtly political, the transgressive, and the weird.” Many of the male writers’ historical epics that sweep through the political landmarks of twentiethcentury China have been translated. By contrast, their female counterparts have been largely neglected. The first large-scale social awakening of Chinese women writers’ female consciousness did not occur until the New Cultural Movement (1915–1927), a movement that had advocated for women’s rights, power, authority, and status. However, this feminist trend was truncated by the subsequent AntiJapanese War (1937–1945), which instigated a wave of revolutionary writing. The war became the dominant theme and women’s self-awareness was stifled by nationalism. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, women’s voices were silenced, as the policy of the Chinese Communist Party upheld absolute equality between the two sexes. The Party legally guaranteed and protected women’s rights to participate in the workforce, to choose their own marriage partners, and to demand divorces. Nevertheless, such a statesponsored liberation emphasized women’s equal responsibility as men to serve the nation, thereby discouraging their pursuit to claim female characteristics and suppressing their desire to articulate their own concerns. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), sexual identity and gender difference were further denied in the cultural discourse. Female-conscious expression was either discouraged or disallowed. The iconic female figures were the asexual “iron girls” who undertook the revolutionary struggle equally with their male counterparts. It was not until 1978, when the ideological and political restrictions imposed on literature were loosened, that women’s self-conscious writing started to flourish again. Women writers in post-Mao China thrive as a distinct group on the literary scene, ushering in a second upsurge of literary output by women writers in the Chinese mainland. The focus of this article is to discuss the translation into English of Chinese women writers after the reform and opening up in 1978 by different translation agents. Agents of translation are perceived as “social actors who are heavily involved in the dynamics of translation production and the power interplay arising at every stage throughout the translation process.” This definition of agents is widely accepted in translation studies. Agents in translation “may also be magazines, journals or institutions.” They are “individuals who devote great amounts of energy and even their own lives to the cause of a foreign literature, author or literary school, translating, writing articles, teaching and dissemination of knowledge and culture.” Nevertheless, the study of agents is often reduced to the study of translators and their habitus alone. Although agency has been considered of primary