[Event] Jiao Tong Baker Centre 2018 Seminar Series 1: Prof. Leo Tak-Hung Chan on ‘ Translation and Global English: Forms of Academic Writing in China’
Translation and Global English: Forms of Academic Writing in China
Abstract:
How does a world in which English is the academic lingua franca impact the humanities scholar? For Chinese (non-Anglophone) scholars, there are essentially three choices as far as academic writing is concerned: (1) untranslated publications in Chinese; (2) research communicated in English, although ideas in Chinese have actually undergone some kind of “self-translation” into English; and (3) research in Chinese translated into English by someone who mediates between the original text and the translation. The first category can be termed untranslated writing; the second, translingual writing; and the third, translated writing. Specific reference will be made in this paper to the shifting importance this third category has assumed in Chinese scholarship in the last decade but the main focus will be on the challenges faced by all non-Anglophone humanities scholars in attempting to publish in English.
Recommended Readings:
Bennett, Karen (2012). English Academic Discourse: Hegemonic Status and Implications for Translation. Saarbrucken: Lambert Academic Publishing.
Canagarajah, A. Suresh (2002). A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press.
朱劍 (2009).〈學術評價、學術期刊與學術國際化——對人文社會科學國際化熱潮的冷思考〉.《清華大學學報(哲學社會科學版)》5: 126-137.
About the Speaker:
Leo Tak-hung CHAN, Professor of Translation, was (for ten years) Head of the Department of Translation, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Over the years he has taught at the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong, Indiana University, Georgetown University and the University of Maryland. In 1991-92 he was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by the University of Michigan. He was Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan (2014), Visiting Honorary Professor at Fudan University (2017) and CETRA Chair Professor of 2017 at the University of Leuven, Belgium. In 2018 he was awarded the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.
Professor Chan’s journal articles have appeared in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Perspectives, Comparative Literature Studies, Translation and Interpreting Studies and Translation Studies, among others. He authored Readers, Reading and Reception of Translated Prose Fiction in Chinese (St. Jerome, 2010), Twentieth-Century Chinese Translation Theory (Johns Benjamins, 2004) and The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts (University of Hawaii Press, 1998), in addition to editing several collections of articles. He is Former President of the Hong Kong Translation Society (2010-18); Chief Editor of Translation Quarterly (since 2014); Founding Editor of Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese; Advisory Board Member of two book series, Literatures, Cultures, Translation (Bloomsbury, USA) and Translation, Interpreting and Transfer (Leuven University Press, Belgium); Editor of Approaches to Translation Studies (E.J. Brill, Netherlands); and Editorial member of Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación (Sindéresis, Spain). His current research interests are: reception issues in translation, adaptation studies, translation and Global English, and Sino-Japanese translation.