ABSTRACT
English, Thai, and Klingon are just a few of the languages that WeChat users utilised to disseminate “The Whistle-Giver,” a censored interview with the Chinese doctor who first released information about the Covid-19 outbreak. By engaging with recent developments in translation studies and the technological specificities of the WeChat platform, this chapter analyses this as a new form of textuality—viral text—that is parasitic to the regime of intelligibility and censorship codified by keyword censorship algorithms. This new textuality, which is particularly salient in online spaces under censorship such as WeChat, allows us to see the Chinese language and the language of the mainland Sinophone as different and equally negotiable categories in an increasingly digital world.
