Literary translation and Contemporary Sino-African Relations

In the context of competing and conflicting discourses around the intensification of relations between China and Africa in the 21st century, this paper explores the potential for gaining insight into the nature of Sino-African power dynamics through a study of literary translation activities. On a theoretical level, this research takes as its starting point frameworks developed in the 1990s that outlined connections between translation import/export patterns and power relations (e.g. Even-Zohar (1990), Jacquemond (1992), Lambert (1995), Venuti (1995)). In the context of China-Africa relations, however, the usefulness of such frameworks is limited by a number of issues including the non-comparability of the two poles, the weak to non-existent publishing industry in some African countries, and the postcolonial linguistic landscape in Africa. Moving away for these reasons from quantitative methods, this paper presents an in-depth examination of a number of literary translation projects in an effort to better understand the variety of roles played by literary translation in the deepening of Sino-African ties. These include the cultivation of good political relations at the highest levels, the careful control of a particular image of Chinese ‘culture’ for foreign audiences, and the promotion of Sino-African friendship itself. The paper asks whether such translation projects can be, or should be, classified as tools of ‘soft power’ (Nye 2004), and reflects more generally on the usefulness of the soft power concept for Translation Studies.

Kathryn Batchelor, University of Nottingham