Dictionary (noun) – A Revolutionary Act or Performance: Socio-Political Lessons from China on the Power and (Un)Translatability of Words

Three recent texts emerging from distinct parts of China, all ‘dictionaries’ of sorts, each serve as a marker of the revolutionary potential of translation within their own contexts, but also as a marker of the limitations to translating the politics of translation to a world reader. At a moment when the Han-centric CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is reducing regional autonomy and forcing citizens into re-education camps, questions of language use and (un)translatability can have immediate and concrete consequences. The official and unofficial multiplicity of Chinese conceptions of ethnicity and nationality provide a necessary background for an understanding of the severity of the consequences of translation in the contemporary contexts. Likewise, a history of the dictionary in China provides insights as to why the dictionary form has been adopted to varying degrees by multiple contemporary texts. The parallax created between the Chinese contexts and world contexts of these texts, however, serves as a stark reminder of the potential bounds of the world literature paradigm.