ABSTRACT
The creation/curation of Chinese literature translation archives is likely to challenge earlier translation studies paradigms. The reason for this is straightforward: earlier approaches have assumed translation to be the outcome of individually constituted if historically and culturally (ideologically) pressurized site/locations, whereas Actor-Network Translation Studies, as outlined by Stalling and Schleifer, demonstrates how translations are outcomes of far larger, diffuse network structures. Problems arise when we limit translation studies to the published source and target texts (even if this is across larger corpuses of editions and variations) since these works are marketed as being “authored” by single humans, when they are not always, at least in cases where layers of participants – publishers, editors, literary agents, marketing departments – all make significant contributions to the processes of translation.
The problem lies, in other words, in the materials that scholars study. When we open translation studies to the full archives of drafts, notes, correspondence, contracts, and other translation ephemera, we find translation to occur within distinct network structures organized by what Complex System Theory describes as “degree of node.” Given this, Stalling and Schleifer find that translation is best understood not only in linguistic, cultural, cognitive, and ideological terms, but also as large-scale negotiations between distinct economies of action. The working of those negotiations, we argue, are hidden in plain sight in the translation archives.
