The Translation Of Chinese Webnovels In The Virtual Community

With the empowerment of the new medium,the non-governmental forces rise,and the virtual communities emerge.The translation of the Chinese webnovels,by taking a road “less trodden”,i.e.transmitted through the virtual communities in the Internet space,adopts a model totally different from the traditional ones in the physical space.Wuxiaworld,founded in December,2014,is the earliest as well as the largest virtual community so far translating the Chinese webnovels,creating a kind of new translation model,yet not any profound and comprehensive study on this new model of translation practice has been published.This study adopts a qualitative research under the interpretativist paradigm and a bottom-up research route,and constructs its conceptual framework by drawing on the Actor-Network-Theory,or ANT for short,proposed by Latour,Callon,etc.This study creatively uses net ethnography,or netnography,as its research method,through which we collect file data by screening and duplicating the website contents and collect the elicited data by interviewing,analyze the data by content analysis,and finally discuss the results by referring to the previous research findings.This study tentatively explores the relationship between the translation practice and the new medium,the actors of the Wuxiaworld actor network,its “translation” process,and the translation model formed during this process.The findings of the study show that the integration of the new medium technology has redefined translation practice by fundamentally changing the contents,model,agents and criticism of translation.To be more specific,the translation contents have extended from the written text to the digital multi-modal forms,the translation models have transcended the top-down procedures adopted by the traditional translation companies,with the emergence of such new bottom-up models as the crowdsourcing,fan subbing,community translation,etc.The translation agents are not limited to the professional translators,making the translation agents more varied with nonprofessional translators flooding in.The translation power gradually transfers from the cultural elites to the general public,challenging the identity and status of the professionals.Besides,translation criticism has found new discourse in the virtual space,as the participation of the common readers brings in the new forms of online criticism.The new medium of Internet empowers the public,constantly constructing or deconstructing the social network and power relations.The participatory culture explodes,thus leading to the emergence of the non-governmental forces and the transformation of the popular culture,and making the virtual communities mushroom.The Chinese webnovels prosper in such virtual communities and create a mass production of literature.Likewise,the translation and transmission of the Chinese webnovels also take its first step in the virtual community.It can be concluded that the Chinese webnovels are produced,translated and transmitted to the world through the Internet,which acts as the catalyst of all those practices.The findings also show that in the innovative translation practice carried out by Wuxiaworld,the quantity and the types of the actors involved in the actor network increase with the time passing by.The development of Wuxiaworld can be seen as the extension of its actor network.On the one hand,the actors are constructed by the actor network,demonstrating the uncertainty and multi-performativity of their identities;on the other hand,the actor network is also constructed by the actors,who proactively participate in the network formation.Thereby,the actors and the actor network construct each other simultaneously.Take the target text as an example.The target text is not passively constructed by the society as is held by the social constructivism.Instead,from the perspective of ANT,the target text in the making,constructed by the society,constructs the society at the same time by playing a role of “mediator” in the Wuxiaworld actor network.With the four moments of “translation”(Callon,1986)in ANT as the conceptual framework,this study finds that the “translation” process of Wuxiaworld actor network can be summarized as follows: the pivotal actor,RWX,interests the potential actors by various means,and makes every effort to enroll as many of them as possible into the Wuxiaworld actor network.Through all kinds of negotiation,he dissolves the controversies and dissidence,thus maintaining the stable operation of Wuxiaworld actor network.“Translation” is the core motive driving the translation practice of Wuxiaworld,while the interest lies in the heart of the “translation”.However,the “translation” of Wuxiaworld is not a linear process,but a complicated and cyclic one.Therefore,we are more inclined to regard the “translation” of Wuxiaworld as a recycled process centered on the “interest” of various actors.Motivated by their interest,these actors either form an alliance by compromising or dissolve an alliance due to the controversies.Interest,controversy,and negotiation,all these three words may replace the four moments of “translation” to form the new anchor points for us to follow the actors and analyze the “translation” process of the virtual communities.Besides,through a meso-perspective,to make a translation project come into reality,the only way is through the negotiation and compromise of the social-materials.In other words,translation practice is not a completely social activity.To make it more exact,translation practice is a social-material activity,requiring the close cooperation and interaction among the human and non-human actors.To take it chronologically,the translation model of Wuxiaworld virtual community has undergone some changes.In its early development,Wuxiaworld was characterized by fan translation.But after negotiating with the copyright holders,and after enrolling more translators and target texts into the actor network,Wuxiaworld’s translation practice transforms from illegal to legal,thus embarking on the path of commercialized operation and forming a model of commercial community translation.Through this descriptive case study of socio-translation studies,we have presented the real conditions of the virtual community in the Internet space,described the production,transmission and consumption of the translation products,discovered the role played by the new medium of Internet,summarized the translation model of Chinese webnovels,and explored the communication and interactions of the human and non-human actors involved,which may shed some light on the Chinese literature “going abroad”.