Our guest from Sichuan University, Dr. Yan Miao, has among other things been working on the topic of inter-cultural translation during her stay with us since last fall. In this seminar she will be presenting, with only some help from me, the background to and some of the preliminary findings from a project where we have evaluated translations of one of the famous classical Chinese poems about the Mulan legend, "Mulan Shi". All are welcome to this pre-last seminar for the semester! We will be going out afterwards, so please let me (Jordan) know by May 20 if you wish to join!

The classical Chinese poem “Mulan Shi” has been translated many times into different languages, as well as adapted to many different genres, including the internationally successful Disney 1998 animated film, and the recent 2020 version. Given the considerable historical, cultural, and semiotic differences between the source and target texts and their corresponding audiences, it is understandable that some of these translations have been criticized for misrepresenting aspects of the original. Drawing upon Sonesson’s influential explication of translation as “an act of double communication” (e.g. Sonesson 2014), and combining it with the concept of “dynamic equivalence” from classical translation theory (e.g. Nida, 1959), we formulate a nuanced framework comprising three levels of translation resemblance, rather than equivalence: (a) resemblance between the structure and content of the source and target texts, (b) stylistic resemblance, and, most importantly, (c) pragmatic resemblance —wherein the impact on the target text audience should resemble that of the source text on the original audience. Using this framework, we compared five English translations of the poem, selecting the one by Arthur Waley, included in The Temple and Other Poems (1923) for more detailed scrutiny. Using a cognitive semiotic framework, we triangulate between a first-person method, leveraging our intuitive grasp of languages and cultural nuances, and a detached, third-person method, involving the quantitative assessment of narrative elements in the source and target texts. To be able to compare the effects of the source and target texts on (modern) audiences, we also devised a survey, to be distributed to native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and English, asking for interpretations and evaluations. The findings of the study should allow us to comprehensively evaluate the degree of equivalence in translated texts, while shedding light on the intricate complexities inherent in cross-cultural translation.