Translating the Translational:

A Comparative Study of the Taiwanese

and Mainland Chinese Translations
of Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English
Dictionary for Lovers
Flair Donglai Shi

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (henceforth Dictionary), first

published by Chatto and Windus in London in 2007, launched its author
Xiaolu Guo’s career as an anglophone writer, and remains her most
widely known and discussed work to date. Before the success of this
English-language debut, Guo was already a published writer of novels and
film commentaries in China and had been teaching at the Beijing Film
Academy for several years. She arrived in London on a Chevening
scholarship in 2002, and has since written several new novels in English,
including UFO in Her Eyes (2009), I Am China (2014), and A Lover’s
Discourse (2020). Guo’s anglophone novels are inherently translational
on three levels. First, in a strictly linguistic sense, the Chinese language
asserts its strong presence in all her novels because idioms and sayings
are often given in Chinese (printed in pinyin or Chinese characters or
both), whether or not accompanied by English translations. Second,
in the broader sense of intercultural relations, the translational may
refer to ‘an area of border trouble where the lines dividing discrete
languages are muddy and disputatious’,1 and Guo’s novelistic practices

1
Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ, 2006), p. 129.

Translation and Literature, 30 (2021), 1–29

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2021.0443
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/tal

1
 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

tend to reflect upon such dividing lines thematically; the protagonists

experience difficulties in comprehending unfamiliar linguistic-cultural
environments, and start questioning their own cultural backgrounds.
Exemplifying this process of cultural translation, acts and ideologies of
bordering are constantly encountered and dissolved in Guo’s stories
(which normally take the form of a Bildungsroman), and her protagonists
usually reach some kind of reconciliation with the transformative effects
of their intercultural experience at the end of their journeys. Third and
last, an even broader conceptualization of the translational proposed by
Rebecca Walkowitz would certainly identify all of Guo’s anglophone
novels as ‘born translated’. Walkowitz uses the term to refer to literary
works in which ‘translation functions as a thematic, structural,
conceptual, and sometimes even typographical device’. Such works
challenge assumptions of ‘native reading’ as writers ‘pretend to write in
another language’, because readers are made aware that the stories, or at
least certain scenes in the stories, are only accessible to them via the
writer’s imaginary translation into the language they read on the page.2
In other words, Guo’s novels are inherently translational because they
are often at least partially set in non-anglophone environments that
remind anglophone readers that the words they are reading have
supposedly been spoken or written in Chinese, or spoken in English
with a Chinese accent, which may or may not be indicated on the
page. Needless to say, the three levels of the translational tend to
become entangled and mixed as readers are led into the multicultural
world of Guo’s stories, where the occasional uses of Chinese characters
and pinyin usually carry the double function of reifying intercultural
reflections and highlighting the impossibility of reading as a native
speaker.
Paradoxical as it may sound, such translational texts tend to be very
challenging to translate. In the debate around the concept of world
literature, the issue of untranslatability features prominently. However,
rather than the ‘incorruptible or intransigent nub of meaning’
categorized by ‘resistant singularity’ of which Emily Apter speaks,3 the
untranslatability of the translational derives precisely from its inherent
multiplicity, which may be called ‘resistant multiplicity’ because the
cultural encounters and admixtures of the translational can only be
represented in its chosen language or languages.

2
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature
(New York, 2015), pp. 4, 6, 12.
3
Apter, p. 235.

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Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

All of Guo’s English-language novels share this problematic of resistant

multiplicity, and yet none of them embodies untranslatability as closely
and presents it as sharply as Dictionary. This is because Dictionary achieves
a heightened translational aesthetic through a clever combination of
formalistic and thematic features, a technique unlikely to be repeated in
Guo’s own career: it is a story mostly written in ‘broken’, or, to put it more
objectively, grammatically imperfect English, about a young Chinese girl
coming to London to study English on a twelve-month student visa.
The novel is made up of numerous dictionary entries, single words
followed by several numbered dictionary definitions, followed by diary
entries written by the protagonist in the first person, recording in
chronological order the experiences she has had during that year
abroad. The beginning of the narrative illustrates:
Alien. (’eI.li.әn) adj. 1. foreign; 2. repugnant (to); 3. From
another world - n. 1 foreigner; 2. being from another world.
alien
Is unbelievabel, I arriving London, “Heathlow Airport.” Every
single name very difficult remembering, because just not “London
Airport” simple like we simple way call “Beijing Airport.” Everything
very confuse way here, passengers is saparating in two queues.
Sign in front of queue say: ALIEN and NON ALIEN.
I am alien, like Hollywood film Alien, I live in another planet,
with funny looking and strange language.4

Thus the protagonist, ‘Z’, notes down the meanings of the different
words she encounters during her journeys in England, Wales, and
continental Europe, and reflects on the life events from which these
words emerge. In the novel, she attends English classes, meets a
Welshman in London, moves in with him, and travels to Europe alone
with her dictionary. Her English improves as she goes through these
intercultural encounters, and the reader can see this progress on the
page. From sentences like those above, to ones like ‘I picture you
standing on your fields, the mountain behind you, and the sound of the
sea coming and going’ on the last page (p. 354), the novel’s
thematization of language use is formalistic experiment par excellence.
As such it presents numerous problems for translators, from the
technical level to the aesthetic level. How does one translate such

4
Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (London, 2007), p. 4. Subsequent
references to this and to the other two editions I deal with are by page number alone, except
where it is not obvious from the context which edition is in question.

3
 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

formalistic progression from ‘broken’ English to ‘perfect’ English into

another language? What about the intercultural dynamic between this
‘broken’ English and the protagonist’s occasional insertions of Chinese
idioms, sentences, and even whole paragraphs? Presumably no other
language can represent Z’s learning process better than the language she
is learning, namely English?
However, the challenges presented by the novel’s resistant multiplicity
have not deterred translators at all. Contrary to what one might expect,
Dictionary is actually the most widely translated novel in Guo’s œuvre.
Since its publication in 2007, the novel has been translated into more
than eighteen languages, including Dutch, German, Spanish, Swedish,
Norwegian, Polish, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Finnish, Czech,
Hebrew, Romanian, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese. I place
Chinese last because it obviously stands out in significant ways. While it is
in principle possible to translate Z’s ‘broken’ English into ‘broken’
French,5 to do the same when translating the novel into Chinese
would produce contradictions between form and content that would
profoundly confuse the reader. Indeed, unlike, say, the French reader,
who can still identify a visible process of a ‘foreigner’ learning French
through ‘broken’ French, and thus imagine a similar situation in English,
the Chinese reader inevitably identifies with Z as the Chinese foreigner
at the centre of the story, who is a native speaker of Chinese. In other
words, the performative authenticity of Z’s intercultural experience
thematized by Dictionary is bound to be lost in a ‘broken’ Chinese version
because that would make the story read like a foreigner gradually
learning to write in Chinese instead. Even if Chinese readers are willing
momentarily to relinquish their status as ‘native readers’, and accept the
challenge of actively imagining what it is like to learn progressively to
write in a new language, such translations into ‘broken’ Chinese face
fundamental technical problems as well: what kind of ‘broken’ Chinese
could be invented to imitate Z’s linguistic journey of learning English as a
native speaker of Chinese? Should the linguistic features of this ‘broken’
Chinese be based on English native speakers’ learning patterns,
including the grammatical mistakes they tend to make in acquiring
competence in Chinese?
The unique challenges presented by Chinese as the target language
make it particularly interesting and worthwhile to investigate the
Chinese-language translations of the novel, and I use the plural here
because, as is not the case with any other target language mentioned,

5
This is indeed the strategy that has been adopted in the French translation. See Xiaolu
Guo, Petit Dictionnaire Chinois-Anglais Pour Amants, translated by Karine Lalechère (Paris, 2008).

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Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

there are actually two different Chinese-language translations of

Dictionary published and circulating in two largely separate geo-cultural
markets. In 2008, a translation into traditional Chinese ( fantizi) by Guo
Pingjie (郭品潔) was published by Locus in Taiwan. In 2009, a simplified
Chinese ( jiantizi) version was published by New Star in mainland China,
translated by Miu Ying (缪莹). Notably, despite its later publication date,
Miu’s translation is not a ‘retranslation’ offering a revision or reinter-
pretation of Guo Pingjie’s previous version.6 Although books do circulate
between Taiwan and the mainland, translations of foreign-language
works are usually commissioned separately in these two literary markets,
largely owing to Taiwan’s status as a self-governing political entity which
does not have the same censorship system as the mainland. According to
Lynette Owen, ‘many Chinese publishers continue to express resent-
ment at having to acquire rights via Taiwan, particularly given the
differences in the written language, … the population and purchasing
power of the two markets, and the continuing political tensions between
the mainland and Taiwan’.7 This separation of the two literary markets
has been deepening as the pro-independence Democratic Progressive
Party (DPP) has become more and more powerful on the island in recent
years, one of the reasons why tensions between the island and the
mainland remain high. This means that even if a Chinese-language
translation already exists in one of these locations, it often takes a new
translation for a particular foreign work to be brought into the other
market, and this new translation is usually carried out with no
consultation of the translation already in existence across the
Taiwan Strait.
By offering a comparative discussion of the two Chinese-language
versions of Dictionary, this paper aims to address two significant gaps in
existing scholarship. First, while an overwhelming majority of academic
studies on Xiaolu Guo have focused on Dictionary, none has discussed
in any detail the translation of this novel into other languages. Apart
from a brief remark on the Taiwanese translation by Wangtaolue Guo,8
all these studies have put the emphasis on the translational aspects
internal to the anglophone edition, including its use of code-switching,
its representation of identity crisis, its appropriation of the Bildungsroman,

6
This idea of retranslation as reinterpretation is offered by Lawrence Venuti, Translation
Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (New York, 2013), p. 97.
7
Lynette Owen, Selling Rights (1991; reprint New York, 2010), p. 226.
8
Wangtaolue Guo, ‘Rhizomizing the Translation Zone: Xiaolu Guo and A Concise Chinese-
English Dictionary for Lovers’, TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies, 10.1
(2018), 102–16 (p. 111).

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 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

its evocations of eroticism, its textual and visual designs, and so on.9
There has been no study that takes translations seriously, and examines
the resistant multiplicity of the novel in the wider continuum of cross-
linguistic and intercultural transfers extending to other literary markets.
Here, I would argue, mainland China and Taiwan offer the most
interesting cases.
Second, among the relatively small number of literary works in English
by diasporic Chinese writers that have been translated into Chinese,
Dictionary stands out as a case which, uniquely, places a question-mark
against the ethno-national agenda commonly associated with this kind of
translation. As Guanglin Wang has noted, ‘The reclaiming of diasporic
Chinese writers in the Chinese literary world presents an interesting
history of reception in classifying them either as part of Chinese literature
or as part of diasporic Chinese literature, and their return to the Chinese
world is greatly instrumental in opening a window to the Chinese readers
of ethnic Chinese experience abroad.’10 Rather than functioning as the
material proof that ‘home is reclaimable’,11 the translation of Dictionary
into Chinese is more of a linguistic and formalistic experiment in its
own right. Unlike the diasporic writers discussed in Wang’s book,
such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Brian Castro, whose literary careers
operate mainly in a monolingual anglophone environment, Xiaolu Guo
has no occasion to reclaim home through translation, because she
was already a known author in China, where her literary career began
and her filmmaking ventures continue. Moreover, in Dictionary, Z begins
her journey on a plane from Beijing and returns to the city in the last
chapter; her Chinese national identity has never been in doubt.
Indeed, the ‘ethnic Chinese experience abroad’ offered by the novel is
not a fully localized one. Instead of a strong minority consciousness
related to the preservation and mutation of Chinese cultures overseas,
Z is an intercultural subject in transit, and the story actually brings
her back ‘to the Chinese world’ before the novel itself becomes accessible
to the Chinese reader through translation. Thematically speaking,

9
Fiona Doloughan and Rachael Gilmour have published many articles on the visual and
multilingual aspects of Guo’s novels respectively. With regard to the other aspects mentioned
here, see Eunju Hwang, ‘Love and Shame: Transcultural Communication and its Failure in
Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers’, Ariel, 43.4 (2012), 69–95, for identity
crisis; Belinda Kong, ‘Guo Xiaolu and the Contemporary Chinese Anglophone Novel’, in The
Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, edited by Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner
(Oxford, 2016), pp. 474–97, for Bildungsroman; and Angelia Poon, ‘Becoming a Global Subject:
Language and the Body in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers’,
Translational Literature, 6.1 (2013), 1–9, for eroticism.
10
Guanglin Wang, Translation in Diasporic Literatures (Singapore, 2019), p. 15.
11
Wang, p. 13.

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Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

Dictionary is closer to the tradition of liuxuesheng wenxue, or overseas

Chinese student writing, which has an established genealogy in Chinese-
language literature. Situated in an interstitial space between Chinese
diasporic literature and liuxuesheng wenxue, Dictionary and its translations
into Chinese provide a fertile ground for studying English-Chinese
translation that goes beyond the dialectic of ‘exile versus home’, or
‘routes versus roots’ identified in Wang’s s book.
With these research gaps in mind, the following discussion engages
with a range of concerns in the study of comparative translation through
analysis of the British, Taiwanese, and mainland Chinese editions
of Dictionary. My observations extend to paratexts and in-text visual
design, as well as specific translational strategies. Taking these different
aspects of the textual construct as illustrative of the novel’s resistant
multiplicity, I argue for a more optimistic view of the supposed
‘untranslatability’ of the translational, and acknowledge the creative
choices necessitated by features of such untranslatability. I end with a
brief reflection on the relationship between minor literature and world
literature, and how the concept of world literature may find its most
comprehensive reification in the doubly minoritizing act of translating
minor literature.
❦❦❦
Opposing the conventional approach to translation analysis that has
been variously called ‘the regime of fluency’, ‘linguistics-oriented
approaches’, and ‘instrumentalism’, Lawrence Venuti has called for
translation to be recognized as a ‘form of authorship’. Such recognition
would acknowledge that both an ‘original’ and its translation are
derivative:
Both consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the
foreign writer nor the translator originates, and that destabilize the work of
signification, inevitably exceeding and possibly conflicting with their
intentions. As a result, a foreign text is the site of many different semantic
possibilities that are fixed only provisionally in any one translation, on the
basis of varying cultural assumptions and interpretive choices, in specific
social situations, in different historical periods. Meaning is a plural and
contingent relation, not an unchanging unified essence, and therefore a
translation cannot be judged according to mathematics-based concepts of
semantic equivalence or one-to-one correspondence.12

12
Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995; reprint
New York, 2008), pp. 274, 13.

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 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

However, this affirmative stance toward the creative and proliferative

energies of texts in translation does not mean comparative studies of
different translations of a text cannot be evaluative. Adopting Jean-
Jacques Lecercle’s notion of the ‘remainder’, which refers to ‘the
linguistic equivalent of the Freudian unconscious’,13 Venuti has claimed
that ‘good translation is minoritizing: it releases the remainder by
cultivating a heterogenous discourse, opening up the standard dialect
and literary canons to what is foreign to themselves, to the substandard
and the marginal’.14 Corresponding to this criterion, comparative studies
of translations should not be about contrasting one edition or another
against the ‘original’ and reaching conclusions as to which is the most
‘faithful’. Acts of comparison are instead based on a willingness to reflect
on concepts like originality and fidelity, and should highlight the
resistant multiplicity of the text, which has been linguistically, culturally,
and most importantly, ontologically liberated by translations. As Xiaofan
Amy Li puts it, ‘the strength of comparison is that it can help us
discover … preconceptions and be more critical of them’.15
Moreover, a comparative-affirmative study of the translational
ontology, or resistant multiplicity, of a text necessarily involves
close reading, as opposed to Franco Moretti’s paradigm of ‘distant
reading’, whose purpose lies in tracking patterns of translation and
circulation in search of ‘larger’ structures like genre traditions
and cultural ‘systems’.16 Venuti’s rebuttal of Moretti makes an
argument for the necessity of close reading in Translation Studies,
which in turn offers an effective justification as well as a sense of
practical intervention for my methodological choice of comparative close
reading:
The idea that close reading ‘necessarily depends on an extremely small
canon’ is false; the problem is rather that close reading continues to be
performed on a limited canon of original compositions, betraying,
I would argue, an unexamined investment in a romantic concept of
authorial originality that marginalizes a second-order practice like
translation.17

13
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (New York, 1990), p. 23.
14
Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (New York,
1998), p. 11.
15
Xiaofan Amy Li, ‘When Do Different Literatures Become Comparable? The Vague Borders
of Comparability and Incomparability’, in Minding Borders: Resilient Divisions in Literature, the Body
and the Academy, edited by Nicola Gardini et al. (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 201–17 (p. 213).
16
Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1.1 (2000), 54–68
(p. 57).
17
Venuti, Translation Changes Everything (n. 6), p. 199.

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Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

I take close reading in this sense as meaning meticulous examination of

all the physical features and paratextual items that make up a literary
commodity. Putting this methodology of comparative close reading
into practice, the ensuing discussion focuses on three distinct aspects of
the three editions of Dictionary, aspects in which translation tends to
generate the strongest differences.

The first aspect of comparison to be addressed in my close reading is the

use of paratexts. As Gérard Genette points out, paratexts frame the core
text and shape its reception through the impact on the reader of their
‘spatial, temporal, substantial, pragmatic and functional character-
istics’.18 Paratexts are usually replaced or rewritten when a book gets
translated, which suggests two questions for comparative studies: What
are the functions and effects of the original paratexts? And how far are
these functions and effects retained in translation?19
For the three editions of Dictionary, perhaps the most conspicuous
paratextual change can be found in the book cover design. The cover of
the British edition (Figure 1)20 displays features typical of the visual
design imposed on publications by diasporic Chinese women writers. In
this visual representation of the novel’s protagonist, the woman’s
curvaceous figure is highlighted by the contrast between the colour
tones of her naked body and the bright red background that dominates.
As an object of desire to be looked at, her face is almost entirely covered
by her straight black hair as she lowers her head and looks down – a
gesture that signifies pudeur, shyness, or both. Her eyes are not even in
clear view, let alone able to gaze back at the viewer. Her body is partly
hidden by stylized fig leaves, some with stems, which constitute the minor
horizontal and diagonal dimension of the cover artwork. It is briefly
mentioned in the novel that Z’s Welsh boyfriend has a fig tree in the
garden of the London house they live in, but more importantly, the fig
leaves add a biblical flavour to the presentation of the naked female body,
and together they bespeak Z’s intercultural Bildungsroman as a journey of
sexual self-discovery.

18
Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, translated by Jane E. Lewin
(Cambridge, 1997), p. 4.
19
For these two questions I draw upon Valerie Pellatt, ‘Introduction’, in Text, Extratext,
Metatext and Paratext in Translation, edited by Valerie Pellatt (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013),
pp. 1–8 (p. 3).
20
The author gratefully acknowledges the permission granted to reproduce the copyright
material in this article. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their
permission for the use of copyright material.

9
 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

Figure 1: Front cover of the British edition (Copyright©Chatto & Windus, 2007.
All rights reserved).

Textual details on the cover also enhance the book’s attractiveness

as a literary commodity. Above the title of the novel is a three-line
header impressed in gold lettering drawing attention to the book’s
shortlisting for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Next to the
image of the body is a four-line blurb from the Asian American writer
Amy Tan, who is probably still the most widely known woman writer
of Chinese descent for anglophone readers. As an example of
what James English calls ‘the economics of cultural prestige’,21 the
nomination for the prize and the endorsement from a familiar name
come together to channel cultural capital to Dictionary and facilitate
its acquisition of economic capital for the publisher and the author
Xiaolu Guo.

21
James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Creation of Cultural Value
(London, 2005), p. 4.

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Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

Figure 2: Front cover of the Taiwanese edition (Copyright©Locus, 2008.

All rights reserved).

There is a certain resemblance between the cover of the British edition

and that of the Taiwanese edition, even though the latter (Figure 2) has a
much less flamboyant design. The overall colour tone of the Taiwanese
cover is black-grey, and thus it emanates a much darker ambience.
A close-up of a female Asian face and neck shows less than half of the
face. Her eye looks up rather than down. More prominent is the flowery
tattoo on her neck, which, though not as explicitly sexual as the fig leaves,
still serves as a marked symbol of her femininity. As for the textual
components, the Orange Prize is still mentioned and placed immediately
above the author’s name, but no endorsement from another author
features. However, the most interesting aspect of the Taiwanese cover
is the translational arrangement of the title, which has a tripartite
structure with additional exegeses not found in the British edition.
The title ‘戀人版中英詞典’ is given highest-order prominence via
the use of large, bold, traditional Chinese characters. The English title
is much smaller, and accompanied by a series of word-by-word
explanations and notes written in the first person from the perspective

11
 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

of the protagonist (the words translated in bold are those coloured red in
the Chinese):22

A 我老是一個人
(I am always alone)
Concise 過最簡單的生活其實最複雜最難達成
(Living the simplest life is actually the most complex and
difficult)
Chinese 中國愈來愈遠
(China is farther and farther away)
English 我的英語開不了口
(I cannot open my mouth to speak English)
Dictionary 詞不達意
(The words are not expressive enough for my meanings)
for 你會給我的生命帶來一切
(You will bring everything into my life)
Lovers 為什麼自由比愛更重要
(Why is freedom more important than love)

The English title, then, is arranged vertically, and each word has a line of
‘exegesis’ in Chinese next to it. The horizontal arrangement is a
miniature of the en face format of the entire book, which has the
English text on the verso pages and the Chinese text on the rectos. The
English text pages and the Chinese text pages have Arabic numbering
and traditional Chinese numbering respectively, and they progress
within their own systems, each reaching 267 pages at the end (even
though page 267 in the Chinese text is blank, the page number is
nonetheless given to keep the correspondence consistent).
However, the mini-exegeses which I have translated above are not strict
translations of the words in the English title. Rather, they expand on
them in creative ways that echo Z’s narrative. Within these mini-exegeses,
as can be observed, are included loose translations of the Chinese words
marked in red. ‘Concise’ corresponds to ‘簡單’ (‘simplest’), ‘Chinese’ to
‘中國’ (‘China’), ‘dictionary’ to ‘詞’ (‘words’), and so on. It is not clear
whether these loose translations should be thought of as being

22
Xiaolu Guo 郭小櫓, Lianrenban zhongyingcidian 戀人版中英詞典 (A Concise Chinese-English
Dictionary for Lovers), translated by Guo Pingjie (Taipei, 2008). All the English translations of
material from the two Chinese-language editions are mine. As I have to discuss the creative
energies and strategies of these translations, my own translations of the Chinese words back into
English are essentially re-translations for a paper written in English, adding another layer to the
translational nature of a text like Dictionary as well as the peritexts, or comments, around it.

12
Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

Figure 3: Front cover of the mainland Chinese edition (Copyright©Nanjing Han

Qing Tang Design Co./New Star Press, 2009. All rights reserved).

contributed by the author, the translator, or the editor, but they form an
integral part of the cover design which signals the bilingual and
translational features of the book as a whole.
The translation of ‘Chinese’ (the language) into ‘China’ (the nation)
is particularly interesting to note. Similar to the use of the exotic Asian
woman retained and deployed in a subtler fashion on the cover of the
Taiwanese edition, the appearance of ‘China’ in the exegeses invites a
mode of interpretation that establishes a distance from this nation, and
thus allows Taiwanese readers to consume this novel as the story of an
Other. This strategy of distancing and exoticizing becomes especially
clear when we compare the Taiwanese cover to the cover of the mainland
Chinese edition (Figure 3). The visual design of the mainland Chinese
edition is almost minimalist, and all racial and national signifiers
disappear. In their stead, it is the gendered aspects of the novel that
have been highlighted through the overwhelming pink colour of the
background, with the blooming flowers foregrounded and also coloured
pink. Apart from the title and the author’s name, which appear in both
languages, the only additional textual details are the translator’s name in
Chinese, superimposed handwriting that seems to show fragments of
transcribed conversations in English (‘HER: … HIM:’), and a line in

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 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

Figure 4: Writer’s Preface to the mainland Chinese edition (Copyright©Nanjing

Han Qing Tang Design Co./New Star Press, 2009. All rights reserved).

Chinese near the centre of the design which reads: ‘不完美的语言 完美

诠释不悔爱情’ (‘imperfect language, illustrating unrepentant love
perfectly’).
The mainland Chinese edition also contains a preface by Xiaolu Guo.
This is presented in handwritten form, in simplified Chinese, before the
story starts (Figure 4). In this additional space that is not found in the
other editions, Guo explains her intentions to her Chinese readers,
characterizing the novel as an experimental, philosophical, and
highly individualist exploration of ‘the dilemma of communication’
(‘交流的困境’)23 – the opposite of the reductive representation of the
racial/national Other suggested by the paratexts of the British and
Taiwanese editions. Not only does Guo make a link between Dictionary
and Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse,
1978), she also explicitly draws out the themes of the novel, including
‘loneliness’ (‘孤独感’), ‘existentialism’ (‘存在主义’), ‘social relations’
(‘社会关系’), and ‘love story as the story of history’ (‘爱的故事是一个历
史的故事’). None of these have anything to do with the linguistic,
national, racial, and cultural differences between Z and her lovers that

23
Xiaolu Guo 郭小橹, Lianrenban zhongyingcidian (恋人版中英词典) (A Concise Chinese-English
Dictionary for Lovers), translated by Miu Ying (Beijing, 2009), p. 2.

14
Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

are foregrounded in the cover designs of the British and Taiwanese

editions. In other words, as a story about a Chinese national’s self-
discovery overseas, the Chineseness of Dictionary is at least superficially
de-thematized, and the self-discoveries are in turn made to stand out so
that a heightened sense of individualism may offset any Orientalist
flavours of the anglophone ‘original’.
According to Venuti, ‘a translation recontextualizes the source text in
the translating language and culture by applying a set of formal and
thematic interpretants to inscribe an interpretation’.24 However, what my
observations on the paratexts of Dictionary have shown so far is that
Venuti’s notion of translation as an act of recontextualization should be
taken as a neutral one, and his affirmative stance towards what he calls
the ‘foreignizing effects’ of translation does not mean that we should
neglect the exoticizing or orientalist uses of translation that are often
intermixed with such foreignizing effects. That is why translations, as acts
of recontextualization, must be examined in comparative close reading.
Writers may not be conscious of their readerships when they write, but
anticipations of different readerships’ reception of a literary work
certainly play an important role in how it is presented in published
form, especially when it is translated.
A second area for comparison concerns the different intra-textual
layouts of the various editions of Dictionary. ‘Fonts, paragraphing, [and]
layout’ are among the ‘scarcely visible’ elements that influence reading,
and can technically be seen as paratextual features.25 However, for Xiaolu
Guo’s Dictionary, such elements are a highly visible feature that differ-
entiates her work from other fiction in the global literary marketplace.
Moreover, since both Chinese-language editions present the novel
bilingually, with each page in English facing another in Chinese
translation, there is scope for innovative design features, to which
I shall attend.
In the British edition, the dictionary/diary format is lent added
authenticity through the occasional appearance of facsimile hand-
writing, images of documents, and hand-drawn maps. It is stated in the
front matter that these insertions do not necessarily come from Xiaolu
Guo, but result from the teamwork of several designers, whose names are
listed. The Taiwanese edition has replicated the dictionary/diary format
in a straightforward manner; each chapter here also begins with a word,
followed immediately by definitions. However, there is no information
about text designs and designers in the front matter, and all the

24
Venuti, Translation Changes Everything (n. 6), p. 4.
25
Pellatt (n. 20), p. 2.

15
 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

aforementioned visual elements are replaced with standard textual

material in this edition; there are no intra-textual facsimiles or other
images. The reason for this drastic change is likely to be cost savings on
what is an already thick bilingual book. Indeed, the overall principles
underlying the design of the Taiwanese edition seem to be convenience,
simplicity, and clarity, which is why a neatly organized chapter outline has
been added at the beginning.
In contrast to the economical design of the Taiwanese edition, the
mainland Chinese edition of Dictionary has much more elaborate features
that would actually qualify it as an artwork in its own right. Indeed, the
book design is done by a professional art studio, Hanqingtang (瀚清堂),
and the lead designer, Zhao Qing (赵清), is an internationally
recognized artist who has won the award for ‘Most Beautiful
Chinese Book’ (‘中国最美的书’) more than twenty times in his
career.26 He has been interviewed about the design of the book, and
written articles on the artistic considerations behind it. According to him,
his team immediately recognized the British edition’s experimental
format and sought to extend its ‘explorative spirit’ (‘探索的精神’) to the
textual and visual design of the mainland Chinese edition as well.27
At least three aspects of Zhao’s design are worthy of note. First, rather
than the standard black-on-white printing used in the other two editions
(and in most paperback book designs), Zhao has opted for a more
creative colour scheme to echo the linguistic and gender binarism of
Guo’s novel. While principally using a white paper stock, Zhao has made
the words and pictures alternate in a dyad of luminous colours. English
texts and related illustrations usually appear on rectos in purplish blue,
the Chinese translation and related illustrations on versos in red (see
Figure 5). This dyad can even be found in the pair of ribbon bookmarks
bound into the book. For Zhao, different colours have different ‘implied
characters’ (‘隐在性格’). Red is feminine, passionate, and seductive; it
best represents Z. Purple-blue is masculine, reserved, and slightly
‘mythic’, and best represents her Welsh boyfriend. Needless to say,
such an arrangement requires multi-colour printing for every copy of the
book, and is thus the opposite of economical. The chromatic scheme
may be conservative in its choice of the classic blue-red (or blue-pink)
gender binary, but it does add an explicitly visual aspect to the

26
Zhao is also a member of the international artist collective Alliance Graphique Internationale,
and a short biography in English can be found on the organization’s website, available at
<https://a-g-i.org/design/a-concise-chinese-english-dictionary-for-lovers#bio> (accessed 1 July
2020).
27
See Zhao’s interview on the book at <https://news.artron.net/20121214/n290347.html>
(accessed 18 May 2020).

16
Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

Figure 5: Internal design of the mainland Chinese edition (Copyright©Nanjing

Han Qing Tang Design Co./New Star Press, 2009. All rights reserved).

experimental formats of Guo’s novel. In this process, translation

becomes a kaleidoscopic material activity that goes beyond ideological
concerns about domesticating or foreignizing effects.
Secondly, not only have the facsimile handwriting, images, and hand-
drawn maps of the British edition been retained, the mainland Chinese
edition also intersperses numerous illustrations freshly designed for each
of the chapters, such as snippets from a Chinese calendar (see Figure 5)
and drawings of figs, hearts, planes, and other objects mentioned by Z in
the novel. Zhao remarks in his interview that most of these additional
drawings were actually done by a ten-year-old, and they conduce to
a simple, carefree atmosphere. (The hand-drawn quality of these
illustrations integrates with the style of the images from the British
edition so that the Chinese reader is unlikely to detect inconsistency in
the designs.) Moreover, apart from the pink cover on the outside of the
book discussed above, Zhao has designed an additional inside cover,
which, despite its minimalist style, is imbued with symbols and metaphors
(Figure 6). Against the white background, a lone rose blooms in the
lower left corner, while in the upper right corner a blue bird and a red

17
 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

Figure 6: Inside cover of the mainland Chinese edition (Copyright©Nanjing Han

Qing Tang Design Co./New Star Press, 2009. All rights reserved).

bird are resting on different parts of the Chinese character ‘愛’ (‘love’),
which is almost cut in half by the margin of the page. While the different
colours of the love birds are consistent with Zhao’s generic scheme of
gender and linguistic binarism, he explains that the idea itself came from
the Chinese idiom ‘劳燕分飞’, which uses two birds flying in different
directions as a metaphor for lovers being forced apart. Such designs are
innovative attempts at mobilizing cultural references unique to the
Chinese-language context, and this edition of Dictionary becomes
recognizably localized as the designer merges visual and literary art
into a new hybrid cultural commodity with a specific target readership
in mind.
Finally, rather than the method of parallel printing of English and
Chinese texts adopted by the Taiwanese edition, the mainland Chinese
edition uses the standard portrait orientation for the Chinese text, but
landscape orientation for the pages in English (see the lower right image
in Figure 5). Each appearance of the keyword in the chapter title is also
highlighted in the English text to enhance its resemblance to a dictionary

18
Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

notebook. This divergent arrangement adds another layer of separation

between the English text and the Chinese translation to the previously
mentioned colour binarism. Together with the insertion of additional
illustrations, this arrangement clearly indicates the mainland Chinese
edition’s prioritization of artistic distinction over readability and
convenience. Overall, the different layouts of the three editions create
different translational dynamics between the novel’s experimental
stylistics and its materiality, or physical presentation. It might be added
that these different dynamics reflect the collaborative nature of the
process at work here. They demonstrate that as well as the author and the
translator, multiple agents, including editors and designers, participate
in the staging of translational possibilities and contribute their
professional skills in ways that often remain subtle or invisible.
❦❦❦
The use of different translational strategies is the last and most important
aspect of comparison in my close reading that must be tackled through
cross-linguistic analyses. As outlined earlier on, Dictionary is an inherently
translational text with many bilingual elements integrated into the very
content of Z’s stories. For this reason, translating the narrative content
into Chinese is particularly difficult, and yet this difficulty also affords
different translators more room to make creative judgments and
decisions. Both the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese editions have
rendered Z’s ‘broken’ English into grammatically correct Chinese that
reads smoothly. As a result, their readers are unlikely to notice an overt
process of linguistic-cultural progression, as will readers of the British
edition. Also worth noting is the fact that despite the censorship system in
mainland China, there are hardly any cuts in the mainland Chinese
edition, so the English half of the published text is largely the same as the
British and Taiwanese editions, and the characters’ discussions on
sensitive issues such as sex, Tibet, Taiwan, and communism have all been
included and translated.28 However, they differ in their use of the
Chinese language. The Taiwanese translation is rather elaborate

28
The only missing part in the mainland Chinese edition is the sentence ‘It is like Mao’s little
red book, it is written in the imperative tone’ (p. 322 of the London edition, but not found in
the Beijing edition where it should appear on pp. 418–19). Other references to Mao’s Little Red
Book have, however, been included and translated (e.g. pp. 51, 53, 227 of the Beijing edition),
even though ‘a dictator like Mao’ has been euphemistically translated as ‘像毛主席这样的领导
者’ (‘a leader like Chairman Mao)’ on page 286. These observations subvert common
stereotypes about the differences between Taiwan and mainland China in terms of publishing
restrictions, which, as I have pointed out by quoting Xiaofan Amy Li (p. 8, above), shows how
comparative close reading of translations can facilitate reflection on our own ideological and
cultural assumptions.

19
 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

compared to the mainland Chinese rendition. For example, in the

‘Prologue’, Z records her thoughts while on the plane from Beijing to
London, which the two Chinese-language editions translate with marked
differences in terms of both style and detailedness. In quoting I have
emboldened the key words of my analysis. The British edition reads:
Looking outside the massive sky. Thinking air staffs need to set a special
time-zone for long-distance airplanes, or passengers like me very confusing
about time. When a body floating in air, which country she belonging to?
(p. 3)
The Taiwanese edition offers:
窗外望去，天空廣袤無際。想想看，機組員得替長途客機或像我這樣搞
不清時間的旅客設定時區。當人的身體浮游高空時，哪個國家算她的歸
屬所在？
(p. 1)

(Outside the window, the sky seems boundless. Thinking about that, the
aircrew should designate a time zone for long-distance flights or people
like me who get confused about time. When a person’s body is floating and
roaming the high skies, which country will count as the place of her
belonging?)

The mainland Chinese edition:

看着外面广阔的天空。想着机组工作人员该给长途飞行的飞机，或者是
像我这样觉得时间非常混乱的旅客，设置一个特别的时区。当身体漂浮
在空气中的时候，她属于哪个国家？
(p. 1)

(Looking at the vast sky outside. I am thinking, the aircrew should set a
special time zone for long-distance flights, or travellers like me who feel
very confused about time. When her body floats in the air, which country
does she belong to?)
The adjective ‘massive’ is translated into the idiom ‘廣袤無際’
(‘boundless’, or literally ‘vast without end’) in the Taiwanese edition,
whereas the mainland Chinese edition opts for a simpler equivalent
‘广阔’ (‘vast’, ‘broad’). Similarly, ‘floating’ becomes ‘浮游’ (‘floating and
roaming’) and ‘belonging’ acquires a classical Chinese flavour in the
phrase ‘歸屬所在’ (‘place of belonging’) in the Taiwanese edition,
whereas the mainland Chinese edition retains the British edition’s
straightforwardness by using simpler words. As a result, without
consulting the English text, the Taiwanese reader is likely to be
impressed by Z’s embellished style, and to perceive her as the possessor
of literary skills and artistic sensibilities, whereas the mainland Z’s direct,

20
Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

straightforward writing gives the mainland Chinese reader an image of

her as an unsophisticated country girl.
Apart from such divergent choices in translational stylistics, the two
Chinese-language versions deal with the multilingual dimensions of
Dictionary differently, including its thematic use of code-switching and
scenes of miscommunication. In terms of code-switching, one of the
most-discussed passages in the British edition is when Z suddenly stops
writing in English and switches back to her mother tongue in the entry
headed ‘Nonsense’ (p. 179 of the London edition). Although Chinese
characters do occasionally appear in the form of idioms and phrases in
the book, this passage is the first time the British reader is presented with
an entire entry written in Chinese, in which Z says she is ‘sick of speaking
English’ and asks ‘why do we have to study languages?’ Guo’s deliberate
insertion of a Chinese passage at this point in the novel brings together
form and theme. Its disorienting effects on the monolingual English
reader are both semantic and visual, and these effects in turn make it
easier for the reader to sympathize with Z’s frustration in learning a
foreign language. However, being a bilingual book targeting a primarily
monolingual audience, it affords its readers relief as soon as they turn the
page: on page 180 they find a translation of the Chinese passage in
grammatically correct English which is italicized throughout and marked
‘Editor’s translation’. Admittedly, though not really a problem for
translations of the novel in other languages, this creative use of
code-switching and translation, its disorientating effects and thematic
significance, cannot be replicated for monolingual Chinese readers. The
Taiwanese edition, for example, has not altered its overall layout to
reflect this sudden insertion of Chinese in the British edition. The
italicized English passage is taken from the British edition, and appears
on the verso without the note ‘Editor’s Translation’, while the Chinese
passage appears on the right-hand page (p. 133) without any indication
that this is actually Z’s own writing instead of a translation by the
Taiwanese translator. Such an arrangement may not have any particular
effect on the monolingual Chinese reader, but any bilingual Taiwanese
reader following both texts is likely to be confused as to why Z’s English
has suddenly become ‘perfect’. In contrast, the mainland Chinese
edition presents Z’s Chinese passage first (pp. 232–3), followed by a
blank page with highlight marks not containing any highlighted words,
and thus apparently signalling a disappearance. This is arguably a better
translational strategy because it retains the abruptness and oddity of the
Chinese insertion, while at the same time the lack of the corresponding
English text implies that this passage is written directly in Chinese by Z. If
the Taiwanese edition prioritizes the completeness of the textual

21
 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

material taken from the British edition, the mainland Chinese edition
can be said to have prioritized replicating as far as possible the textual-
visual effects of the British edition. In the process it demonstrates the
publisher’s and translator’s awareness that the ‘Editor’s translation’ in
English (in the British edition) does not really matter to readers of
the mainland Chinese edition, who do not need such translations to
discern Z’s thoughts anyway. The mainland Chinese edition localizes
these effects for its readers, and is therefore a better translation
according to Venuti’s paradigm, which emphasizes ‘minoritizing’ and
‘recontextualization’.29
Scenes of miscommunication in the novel are usually brought about by
one of three different kinds of linguistic misrecognition, each of which
has different implications for its Chinese-language translators. The first
is polysemy. For example, shortly after Z meets her Welsh boyfriend,
he talks to her about his homosexual experiences, which she does
not immediately understand due to the polysemous nature of the
word ‘men’:
You talk to me about everything. But I not understand completely. You say:
‘I used to try to love men. For most of the last twenty years I have been out
with men.’
I think is good try love men. World better place. But go out where?30

While there is certainly a degree of ambiguity in her boyfriend’s use of

the noun, Z’s words reveal that she has mistaken ‘men’ meaning male
human beings for ‘men’ referring to humans in general. Since there is
no equivalent word in the Chinese language that would capture the
double meaning of ‘men’ in this conversation, each translator has to
come up with translational strategies, and their decisions will inevitably
affect how these two characters are perceived. For example, all three
occurrences of ‘men’ are rendered as ‘人’ (‘human’) in the Taiwanese
edition (p. 55). This straightforward and consistent translation elimin-
ates the linguistic misunderstanding, or at least ambiguity, of the scene
described by the British edition, and the Taiwanese reader is left with the
impression that Z’s boyfriend used to be a misanthrope rather than a
homosexual. The mainland Chinese edition (p. 104) opts for a different
strategy – ‘men’ as mentioned by the boyfriend is translated as ‘男人’
(‘male’) whereas its occurrence in Z’s thought is rendered as ‘人类’
(‘human’). As a result, the mainland Chinese reader is left with the
impression that Z is open-minded about her boyfriend’s past, and does

29
Venuti, The Scandals of Translation (n. 15), p. 11.
30
London edition, p. 72; italics original

22
Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

not see homosexual love as different from love in general. This example
shows that the untranslatability of polysemous words actually gives rise to
creative translation that necessarily alters the semantic content and
literary effects of the source text.
Secondly, linguistic misrecognition is often caused in Dictionary by
mishearing, and Guo utilizes this phenomenon to create humour. A few
days after Z arrives in London, she visits a café and for the first time
samples sparkling or ‘fizzy’ water, a commodity not common in
restaurants in China:
Waiter asks me: ‘What would you like? Still water, or filthy water?’
‘What? Filthy water?’ I am shocked.
‘OK, filthy water.’ He leave and fetch bottle of water.
I so curious about strange water. I opening bottle, immediately lots
bubbles coming out. How they putting bubbles in water? Must be highly
technicaled. I drinking it. Taste bitter, very filthy, not natural at all, like
poison.
(pp. 34–5)

Although Z only writes down what she thinks she has heard, readers of
the British edition can easily infer from contextual information, such as
‘bubbles’, that what she is referring to is actually sparkling water, and that
the slight morphological difference between ‘fizzy’ and ‘filthy’ has been
lost on her, creating a funny scenario involving linguistic and cultural
misunderstanding. However, the phonetic proximity of the two words is
difficult to maintain in translation. For example, the word for ‘fizzy water’
in Chinese, qipaoshui (氣泡水), sounds nothing like the word for ‘filthy
water’, yushui (汙水), or more commonly, zangshui (髒水), and therefore
it would be illogical for Z to mix up these two words in Chinese. The two
Chinese-language editions have adopted different strategies to cope with
this challenge. The Taiwanese edition translates ‘filthy water’ as yushui
throughout this short passage, but adds a line after ‘I am shocked’ which
reads as follows:
‘編按：氣泡水 fizzy water 被聽成了汙水 filthy water [Editor’s note:
qipaoshui fizzy water (English original) has been misheard as yushui filthy
water (English original)]’.
(p. 26)

The consistent appearance of yushui has thus preserved Z’s point of

view as well as her sense of confusion in the British edition, and the
note includes the English words to explain how such mishearing has
taken place. The humorous effects are inevitably compromised by this
interruption, but from another point of view such temporary breaks can

23
 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

serve as the kind of anti-native-reading reminder that Walkowitz takes as

the benchmark of world literature, and in this process, the text’s
translational nature acquires not only visibility but also stylistic and
thematic prominence.31 In comparison with the Taiwanese edition,
the strategy adopted in the mainland Chinese edition (p. 58) is less
comprehensive and involves mistranslation:
侍者问我：‘你想要点什么？蒸馏水还是脏水（其实是滤水）？’
‘什么？脏水？’我震惊了。
‘好的。过滤水。’他走开给我拿回了一瓶水。
The waiter asks me: ‘What would you like? Distilled water or dirty water
(actually filtered water)?’
‘What? Dirty water?’ I am shocked.
‘Alright. Filtered water.’ He walks away and brings me a bottle of water.

Here in the mainland Chinese edition, ‘still water’ becomes ‘distilled

water’, and ‘fizzy water’ becomes ‘filtered water’.
Notwithstanding such translational mistakes, the bigger problem lies
in the fact that this short conversation does not read logically in itself in
Chinese. Readers may still be able to infer that some kind of mishearing
has taken place for Z to have this reaction, but the added parenthesis is
confusing, since there is no note stating that it is added by the editor or
translator, nor any explanation as to why ‘filtered’ water would be
misunderstood as ‘dirty’ water by Z. As a result, the mainland Chinese
reader is likely to wonder whether Z’s reaction is occasioned by external
reasons of intercultural miscommunication or internal causes relating to
her own circumstances, such as anxiety and shyness. While it might not
much matter that this mistranslation more or less eliminates the
humorous effects intended by Guo in the British edition, it does make
this scene stand out rather oddly in the mainland Chinese edition.
I would argue that if ‘good translation’ is about enabling an ‘alternative
set of interpretants’,32 this set of interpretants must be coherent and
comprehensible in the target language independently, regardless of any
intended wordplay or effects in the source text. In this sense, the
Taiwanese rendition of this particular scene is a better translation than its
mainland Chinese counterpart.
A third and last type of linguistic misrecognition is not confined to the
use of English, but happens across languages in Z’s diaries, and
translating such bilingual interplay into a third language is indeed

31
Walkowitz (n. 2), p. 6.
32
Venuti, Translation Changes Everything, p. 185.

24
Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

difficult. For instance, after living in London for over six months, Z gets a
Schengen visa and visits Paris for the first time. She makes the following
comments about the French language:
I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more
strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain and their
pancake is crêpe. Pain and poison and crap. That’s what they have every day.
(p. 203)

For British readers, Z’s misrecognition of the French words may remind
them of their own process of learning French as a beginner, since French
is the most common foreign language learned in Britain and these are
common words. Moreover, Z’s mistaking them for phonetically similar
English words again produces humorous effects that nevertheless appear
quite innocent, whereas it would probably be perceived as deliberately
offensive if a British character passed such comments on the French
language and people. Such common yet nuanced cross-linguistic
interplay between English and French is almost impossible to replicate
in any translation, and the humorous effects are bound to be lost in the
process. Both the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese editions have
retained the French words and translated all the English words without
any additional notes. As a result, monolingual Chinese readers will
surely be confused by Z’s comment on French people eating pain
(tongku 痛苦), poison (duyao 毒藥) and crap (dabian 大便) every day.33 In
this instance, the issue is precisely the lack of creative translations, rather
than too much freedom. An inventive localizing translation of these
French words might use homophonic transliteration instead, such as
pasong (‘怕餸’, ‘the scary dish’) for ‘poisson’, pang (‘胖’, ‘fat’) for ‘pain’,
and kepi (‘咳屁’, ‘coughing fart’) for ‘crêpe’, so that similar humorous
effects can be produced for Chinese-language readers.
The three different kinds of linguistic misrecognition just discussed are
not mutually exclusive, and can be simultaneously present in a single
scenario of intercultural miscommunication. For example, Z meets
an Italian lawyer during her visit to Venice, and after he introduces his
occupation to her in a mixture of English and Italian, she thinks
‘Avocado? Is a fruit also a job?’ (p. 235). As with the French-English
dynamic we encountered previously, British readers would understand
what is going on in this scene with just a little knowledge of Italian,
enough to enable them to register the phonetic proximity between
‘avocado’ and ‘avvocato’, the Italian word for lawyer. When translated
into Chinese, such a scene of mishearing, plus bilingual interplay, plus

33
Taipei edition, p. 148; Beijing edition, p. 260.

25
 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

Z’s question about ‘avocado’ being a polysemous word, can only be

presented in the form of an explanatory note – a strategy repeatedly used
in the Taiwanese edition – or rendered plainly, with humorous effects
therefore omitted, which is what happens in the mainland Chinese
edition.34
Ultimately, the translational strategies adopted by the Chinese-
language editions with respect to stylistic choices or bilingual features
rely as much on the translational dynamics embedded in the source text,
namely the British edition, as on the translators’ or publishers’ different
visions for the text in Chinese, which involve artistic and market
considerations that are both independent and transformative of the
British edition. In these translational processes, Dictionary is no longer a
singular text characterized by its untranslatable translational features, but
a set of texts engaging in an activity which has recently been
characterized as ‘co-creating meaning’.35 Each translated text shares its
inherent resistant multiplicity, and should be read and evaluated in its
own context in terms of stylistic consistency, comprehensive logic, and
cultural coherence.

Apart from Walkowitz’s concept of the ‘born translated’, or what I have

called ‘inherently translational’, Dictionary would fit well within a number
of other current theoretical discussions, and shed additional light.
For example, the fact that Xiaolu Guo’s progressive use of ‘broken’
English has become its most remarked feature seems to confirm Evelyn
Nien-Ming Ch’ien’s claim that ‘weird English constitutes the new
language of literature’.36 Similarly, Guo’s insertions of Chinese idioms
and even paragraphs in her English writings, together with the
occasional appearances of French, Italian, and German words, have
made Dictionary a literary exemplar of what Yasemin Yildiz calls ‘the
postmonolingual condition’, as these formalistic and thematic uses of
multilingual elements in an anglophone novel create ‘a field of tension
in which the monolingual paradigm continues to assert itself and
multilingual practices persist or re-emerge’.37 By way of a concluding
observation on the translational multiplication and circulation of
Dictionary, I wish to suggest that all these relevant discussions relate to
the tension between’ minor literature’ and ‘world literature’, and that

34
Taipei edition, p. 176; Beijing edition, p. 306.
35
Matthew Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, in Prismatic Translation, edited by Matthew Reynolds
(Cambridge, 2020), pp. 1–18 (p. 10).
36
Evelyn Nien-Ming Chi’en, Weird English (Cambridge, 2005), p. 4.
37
Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York, 2012),
p. 5.

26
Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

language plays a particularly crucial role in enabling minor literature to

become world literature. It also reveals the underlying power structures
and institutional constraints involved in the process of such becoming.
Both the concept of ‘weird English’ and the proposal of ‘the
postmonolingual condition’, when applied to the discussion on
Dictionary, describe the dialectic between minor languages and a
dominant language, English. The weirdness of accented English and
the presence of foreign-language elements in such texts can only subvert
the dominance of English to a limited degree. To be more specific: they
may challenge the so-called native reader’s demand for fluency, but will
in no way jeopardize the anglophone text’s comprehensibility as a
consumable literary object. In other words, Dictionary’s subversive power
is bounded a priori by the very condition of having to be read in the major
language of English. Its literary content is based on the experiences of a
minor subjectivity or ‘minority construct’, its stylistics intersperse
translational elements from minor languages, and the text itself operates
primarily in the major language and targets a principal readership
reading in that language: all of these characteristics fit the concept of
minor literature as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.38 Both
diasporic Chinese literature and liuxuesheng wenxue are such ‘minority
constructs’, so a text like Dictionary that is caught between these genres
can be said to be minor within the minor.
However, having characteristics of minor literature does not equal
marginality in the literary marketplace; on the contrary, such character-
istics are usually the very criteria by which critics have tried to define and
delimit world literature. David Damrosch’s widely cited definition of
world literature, for example, focuses on circulation ‘beyond [a given
text’s] culture or origin’, while Pheng Cheah puts emphasis on texts’
‘world-making’ power as ‘an ongoing, dynamic processes of becoming’.39
Minor literatures are often products of intercultural communication
and thus constitute concrete efforts to carve out highly specific
representations of the world, or individual ‘worlds’, caught between
languages and cultures, reifying both the idea of ‘circulation’ and the
concept of ‘becoming’ in the process. More importantly, these
representations have given rise to significant overlaps between migrant
literature, postcolonial literature, and ‘airport literature’ in the
contemporary anglophone literary marketplace, which in turn normalize

38
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Dana
Polan (1975; reprint Minneapolis, MN, 1986), p. 16.
39
David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ, 2003), p. 8; Pheng Cheah, ‘What
is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity’, Daedalus, 137.3 (2008), 26–38
(p. 30).

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 Flair Donglai Shi/Translating the Translational

and popularize minor literatures written in English as an integral, if not

representative, part of such a capitalistic landscape of world literature
dominated by the West.40 In addition, minor literatures in the subgenre
of experimental fiction may ‘self-consciously foreground the challenges
associated with their efforts to reconstitute globalization as a process of
world historical transformation’, but their radical agendas of subverting
conventional literary forms and the politics of cultural respectability still
operate within the confines of the world literary marketplace, which is
now co-opting performances of reflectivity and radicality more efficiently
than ever.41
Furthermore, when the ‘minoritizing act’ of translation is performed
on minor literatures written in English,42 their routes of linguistic and
cultural circulation multiply in such a way that untranslatability as a set of
technical challenges ceases to matter in the face of the attractiveness of
world literature. Translating the translational, or minoritizing minor
literature, is in this sense an event of world literature par excellence, whose
modus operandi is simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal. On the one
hand, foreign cultural resources circulate into anglophone markets,
refreshing their multicultural publishing landscapes and securing
cultural capital for migrant and diasporic authors alike. On the other
hand, as literatures written in English, they are often translated into other
languages, including the ones from which they have drawn foreign
cultural resources, thereby benefitting from their complicity with the
global hegemony of the English language. Indeed, an increasing
number of Chinese writers like Xiaolu Guo inhabit the world literary
marketplace, such as Dai Sijie, Qiu Xiaolong, and Ken Liu, all of whom
choose to write in a major language and then be translated into multiple
languages, including their mother tongue, Chinese. But how often do we
see a white British or American ‘expat’ (whiteness tends to go with ‘expat’
while ‘migrant’ is often reserved for people of colour) writing and
publishing in Chinese in China, not to mention the literally unheard-of
subsequent achievement of getting their Chinese works translated
back into English and then becoming popular in the anglophone
market? As Stephanos Stephanides says, world literature is ‘still
Janus-faced – it is critiqued as the global cannibal consuming minor

40
Pascale Casanova, ‘Literature as a World’, in World Literature: A Reader, edited by Theo
D’Haen et al. (New York, 2013), pp. 269–82 (p. 278).
41
Wendy Knepper and Sharae Deckard, ‘Towards a Radical World Literature: Experimental
Writing in a Globalizing World’, ariel, 47.1–2 (2016), 1–25, (p. 2). For the co-optive power of
world literature, see Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace
(London, 2007).
42
Venuti, The Scandals of Translation (n. 15), p. 11.

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Translation and Literature 30 (2021)

and peripheral literatures and at the same time hailed for its
cosmopolitan possibilities’.43 What the translations of a translational
text like Dictionary show is that the cosmopolitan is the cannibal, and we
should not allow our academic idealism towards the generative power of
creative translation to blind us to the institutional and material
conditions that have made translations possible and desirable in the
first place. Comparative close readings of translational texts like Dictionary
therefore serve as reminders of the importance of balancing such
scholarly idealism against ground-level reality.
The Queen’s College, Oxford

43
Stephanos Stephanides, ‘Translatability of Memory in an Age of Globalization’, Comparative
Literature Studies, 41.1 (2004), 101–15 (p. 101).

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