Making the foreign serve China

In 2009, Maria Tymoczko (2009, 403) issued a call to internationalise translation studies, proposing to ‘de-centre inherited Eurocentric conceptualisations that continue to be commonplace and even dominant in the field despite their decreasing relevance’. Delabastita (2013, 30) situates Tymoczko’s concerns within a questioning movement in the discipline, which asks whether ‘our current theories and methodologies . . . really have the “general” validity that their academic and theoretical status would imply’. Debates on Eurocentricity are not the preserve of translation studies scholars alone, ¹ and in this respect can be seen as part of a more generalised anxiety which arises quite logically, as Delabastita (2013, 30) suggests, from ‘our growing post-colonial sensibility, the greater presence and visibility of non-Western scholars in academia, and the overall erosion of Western hegemony’. ²