Translating literature and globalizing culture: Literary fields and publishing industries in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong

This is an analytic and historical exploration of translation activities in the Chinese-speaking world. By examining the structural transformation of the publishing industry and literary field in Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China, respectively, this study attempts to understand that translation, as a cultural practice in society, reveals the "Chinese" configurations of tradition and modernity under the impacts of Western imperialism and colonialism since the late nineteenth century. The key is to understand the historicity underlying the translation process of the convergence and divergence of locality and globality, which has led to the different developments of modern literature in Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China. With in-depth analyses of the selected authors and their texts, the constructions of national discourses of modern literature, and the global flux of literary production and consumption, the research investigates why and how certain ideas are persistently preferred and some practices are constantly exercised. Of which shows the cultural complexities of globalization with a sociological understanding of "hegemonic hybridity," the imbalanced power relations and the issues of cultural hegemony and domination in the hierarchical structure of world literature. By so doing, this study develops a sociological approach to translation as social relation, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's sociology to focus on the biopolitics of translation, to understand culture on the level of the national on a global scale. Attention is paid to the significant role of the translator, the changes of language policy and foreign language education related to the understanding of the field with which and against which one had been formed. Therefore, while this study argues that we should be aware of the hegemonic forces at work in the global culture industry, translation practices and productions in the three "Chinese" cultural entities have demonstrated how the fields, the hierarchical structure of world literature, are constantly reshaping and reorganizing while the involved agencies confront the position-takings and act upon the dispositions that the fields have imposed on them. With critical interventions, it is then possible to evoke a space of the possible, to question the nationalistic ideologies and to challenge the hegemonic powers.