Translation Extends the Life of Literature | Each Language a New Blooming Flower
Original work (原作)by Shunwei Wang for The Reporter
Translation Extends the Life of Literature | Each Language a New Blooming Flower
The Italian proverb Traduttore, traditore (Translators are traitors) is often used to describe the dilemma faced by the translator: a translated text can never completely match up with the original. But at the same time, a translated text gives the original a new life. Perhaps no book better exemplifies this than Taiwan Travelogue, which itself is actually a pseudotranslation. The book, originally published in Mandarin, presumes to be the fictional Aoyama Chizuko’s travel diary from 1938 which was then “translated” by the real life author, Yang Shuang-zi. The book has actually been translated into Japanese, English, and Korean and those authors faced not just syntactical dilemmas, but real questions of how to grapple with colonialism, cultural exchange, and acceptance from readers–all while making sure the translated books have mass market appeal.
The Japanese translator Miura Yūko, the English translator Lin King, and the Korean translator Kim I-sak all approached this translation project from different cultural vantage points. The Japanese text was to return to the “original” language; the English version would bring international acclaim among the English speaking world; and the Korean translation would reckon with Taiwan’s similar, yet quite divergent, colonial past. These three translations serve as both extensions and as mirrors, plunging this quintessential Taiwanese novel into new linguistic contexts, which in turn gave it new life.
The approach to translating the title dictates how the reader will understand Taiwan
The first step in the process of marketing a translation is choosing a title. The three disparate approaches to translating the title《臺灣漫遊錄》signal three distinct angles to the source text
The Japanese version, titled《台湾漫遊鉄道のふたり》emphasizes the railway (鐵道) aspect as well as the romantic element of the novel (のふた). 1 Miura Yūko has suggested Taiwanese literature is still considered out of the mainstream in Japan, and that the publishers were hoping that the title would both attract railway enthusiasts, and make it clear that this was a love story between two women. Compared with the original Mandarin title, by emphasizing the railroad it stays true to the theme of “travel”. However, by clearly placing the love story between Aoyama Chizuko and Chizuru front and center, Japanese readers are led not toward the historic backdrop of colonialism, but rather the fictional love affair between the novel’s two main characters.
Turning toward the English version, the title Taiwan Travelogue is nearly a direct translation. Lin King revealed that Graywolf Press, in an attempt to attract American audiences, had originally wanted the main character’s name in the title to add a “Japanese element”. But King pushed back, insisting that the alliterative, simpler title was better, and that by having “Taiwan” be the first word in the title, there would be no confusion that this was a Taiwanese work of literature.
The Korean title is《1938 타이완 여행기》which translates directly to Taiwan Travel Diary of 1938. This added date carries quite a significance for Korean readers. Kim I-sak said that the novel is enmeshed in the era of Japanese colonialism which Korean readers are particularly sensitive to. By adding 1938 to the title, readers in Korea will immediately be keyed into the fact that it takes place during Japanese occupation. But if they were to have used the more general term Shōwa, then readers would have an adverse reaction. 2 By using a western calendar date, it establishes the time period in a manner unlikely to upset Korean audiences. At the same time, the Korean publishing company was worried that the term “travelogue” would be interpreted as a classical travel story (a common narrative structure in Asian literature) so they swapped “Travel Diary” for “Travelogue”. At the same time, the cover minimizes the Japanese influence and highlights Taiwanese fruits, flowers, and courtyard architecture. Kim I-sak frankly stated that if the cover overly emphasized the Japanese motifs of the story, it might be rejected by Korean readers.
She also emphasized that she purposely avoided the more traditional Korean name for Taiwan 대만（pronounced: Daeman) for the contemporary word that refers to the Chinese Republic of Taiwan (타이완). By contrasting the modern name with the year 1938, she is signaling to the reader that although the story takes place in the past, it is in dialogue with contemporary Taiwan.
“Pseudotranslation” is not just a literary flavor, but puts the translator front and center
The fictional translation structure of Taiwan Travelogue fooled even Miura Yūko. As the longtime copyright procurer for TaiTai Books, as well as a former student in Mainland China, she pays close attention to Mandarin language publications in general and Taiwanese publications in particular. The first time she came across this novel, she genuinely believed that it was “A Taiwanese travel diary from the Japanese colonial period, that had been translated by Yang Shuang-zi”, which piqued her interest.
She, however, gradually started to catch on to the act. The maps of Liu Ch’uan’s residence at the front of the book did not match with early Shōwa styles. And the foreword, which was signed “Shin Nissagako”, was very similar to the pen name of contemporary Taiwanese author Hsiao Hsiang Shen. Then, after reading the first chapter, she felt the style was a little too modern, and after some online research, finally realized that this pseudotranslation had already sparked quite a conversation online.
Kim I-sak, on the other hand, read Taiwan Travelogue for the first time in 2023, and she was captivated by this “translated work of fiction”. She graduated from Korea’s Sogang University with a degree in Chinese studies. She developed her understanding of Chinese culture from Hong Kong movies, Jay Chou, Jolin Tsai, and other Taiwanese pop culture icons.
In her mind, the book’s most unique feature is not simply a reconstruction of travel under colonialism, but the way that through the pseudotranslation, afterword, and notes throughout, it establishes the translator not as just a simple word switcher but an active interlocutor, critic, and editor of the text. As translator, she can utilize text features to point out Aoyama Chizuko’s colonial misunderstandings, and remind the reader that “the Taiwan of that era was not really like that”. This ensures that the novel does not fall into the trap of romanticizing colonial exploration, as well as illustrating the main character’s limitations.
Lin King believes that since the original text highlights the role of the translator, it is creating space for the English version. Most publishers want the translator to disappear: don’t add foot notes, don’t add a long afterword. Sometimes the translator’s name only appears on the publisher’s page.
But Taiwan Travelogue is in itself a fictionally translated text, so Lin King can abide by her publisher’s wish and become part of a text, but in this novel that does not mean to disappear. Aoyama, Yang, and King all appear as three distinct voices, giving the translation a multilayered feel.
The English translator’s dilemma: whether to unravel the multilayered Chinese language
One of the biggest challenges in translating Taiwan Travelogue into English, is that the original work appears to be written only in Chinese, but in reality, it is comprised of a complicated, multi-language system. The story takes place during the Japanese colonial period, and when the two main characters, Aoyama Chizuko and Chizuru, speak to one another, they would mostly speak Japanese. When Chizuru is introducing her companion to Taiwanese delicacies, she would certainly slip into the Taiwanese vernacular. Therefore “Chinese” 3 would not be the primary language of their conversations, appearing only in the scenes when Chizuru is reading a text aloud.
The multi-faceted nature of the original is concealed by the fact that all of those languages can be represented with Chinese characters. But in English the translator must choose if Mandarin, Japanese, or Taiwanese will be used.
Lin King initially used Pinyin to translate Chinese names and words, but quickly realized that it did not fit. As she points out, today’s mainstream romanization system for Chinese characters is Pinyin, but this was developed under the People’s Republic of China after World War II. It was not fitting for 1930s Taiwan. She realized that if she switched to the older Wade-Giles romanization system, most English readers would not notice. But then a thought dawned on her: If the characters were not speaking Chinese, then why use any Chinese romanization in the novel?
She discussed with her editor and they decided on “hyper-maximalism”, which is to say, they were not going to follow any one system. They were going to follow the original text’s multilingual nature, and create the necessary stumbling blocks for the reader. For example, while Sukiyaki was written in Japanese pronunciation (and not the Mandarin shòu xǐ shāo), Chizuru translates the Taiwanese snack using the Taiwanese Koe-Kńg instead of the Mandarin jīguǎn 4)and in adds the description, “Koe-Kńg is made with minced pork, shiitake mushrooms, scallions, and bamboo shoots wrapped in deep-fried dough”. 5
Therefore, King’s role was not just one of rote language converter, but she was tasked with taking the multitudinal Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese separating them, and, abiding to the constraints of history, conveying their meaning to an English speaking audience. Graywolf Press also decided to use contemporary Japanese pronunciations and Chinese characters to label the map of Taiwan, allowing the English reader to better enter into the space and time of the novel.
The limitations of the transliteration of Taiwanese into Korean and Japanese
Turning now towards the Japanese and Korean translators who showcased their unique strategies toward translation.
The Japanese translator Miura Yūko suggested the original work’s use of the Taiwanese language does not evoke much from the Japanese reader’s imagination. After all, Aoyama Chizuko did not understand the Taiwanese that she came across; the language served more to show the limits of her perception. In the original work, only Chizuru “hears” Taiwanese, which is represented using Chinese characters and Yūko could have represented this in Japanese script. For example “粉粿” (a gelatinous sweet dessert in Taiwan called hún-kué in Taiwanese or fěnguǒ in Mandarin) becomes Funku-e (フンクエ); or “青草茶” (often translated as “grass jelly tea” it’s a common mixture of tea and jelly in Taiwan, it’s called tshenn-tsháu-á-tê in Taiwanese or qīngcǎo chá in Mandarin) becomes Tsetsaude (ツェーツァウデー).
But the publishing company was worried that Japanese readers would not understand these transliterations, and requested that Yūko add annotations to names (especially names of foods). Therefore, 雞管 became Ge-kun (ゲ－クン) as well as an explanation that it is not unlike the Japanese Beancurd rolls.
Miura’s transiterations are too numerous to scour one by one, but it suffices to say that she worked incredibly hard to represent the Taiwanese sounds. She relied on the pronunciation feature of an online Taiwanese dictionary to best match the sounds. After her translation was published, she enrolled in a formal Taiwanese course, and the teacher pointed out places where she had transliterated in an unclear manner, but through this they both realized that there are severe limitations when it comes to conveying Taiwanese sounds in Japanese.
Kim I-sak, on the other hand, kept reminding herself that she was not translating a translation, but rather Yang Shuang-zi’s pseudotranslation, a work wholly represented in Chinese characters. Therefore she wanted her translation to mirror a contemporary Taiwan, and not the linguistic customs of colonial Japan.
Take “滷肉飯” as an example. This dish is often translated into English as “pork rice” and pronounced lóo-bah-pn̄g in Taiwanese and lǔròu fàn in Mandarin. Korean readers would be familiar with this dish, so she just took the modern day pronunciation ru-ro-pa (루로판). But with other foods, less familiar to a Korean audience, she transliterated from the Taiwanese. To her, this was a way of preserving the names of and stories of Taiwanese specialties that are at risk of being forgotten.
In order to faithfully render these Taiwanese pronunciations, she consulted the audiobook version of the original work. She took those pronunciations and dutifully transliterated them into Korean. Yet some names proved particularly hard, especially when the sounds simply did not match up with Korean. In this way, transliterating Taiwanese became a series of choices, and in the end she preserved the unfamiliarity that the main character confronts in the original.
When readers come from different backgrounds: What to delete? What to supplement?
The translator is not just a human dictionary, taking words from one language and finding their counterparts in another. They are also editors and organizers. Lin King, with Yang Shuang-zi’s permission, omitted a large section of the first chapter in the English version. In this scene, Aoyama Chizuko is in Japan when her sisters force her to interview with a potential marriage partner, after which she is invited by the Japanese provincial government in Taiwan to visit for a period. This marriage custom would appear unfamiliar to western audiences and the colonial proceedings would probably confuse them. King also omitted the foreword, since they are not common preceding fiction in English, and parts of the opening glossary and maps, fearing they might impede on English readers’ ability to immerse themselves in the story.
The Japanese version faced similarly complicated choices. Since forewords are also uncommon in Japanese fiction, and this foreword was written by the relatively unknown Yang Shuang-zi, the publisher and translator decided to do away with it. They also took out the fictitious “translator’s note” at the end of the novel, fearing it might confuse their readers.
Miura insisted on keeping the three epilogues at the end of the novel, while the publisher argued that without them, the story was complete enough, and they feared that they would make this author’s first release in Japan too dense. But Miura believed that these were essential to the story’s plot and that removing them would harm the original intention of the text. In the end, she convinced her editor to keep them.
These tough decisions show that translators are not just beholden to the words on the page, but the interests and habits of readers–as well as their editors. In order to properly serve readers who are new to the text, these translators are essentially creating a new world, one where they must decide what remains the same and what must be rewritten.
Translating Taiwanese literature makes one a kind of “professional volunteer”
Miura describes the role of translating Taiwanese literature into Japanese as a project that you must completely throw yourself into, with much of it going as unpaid labor. In Taiwan Travelogue alone, the text comprises Japanese-Taiwanese culinary culture, rail system, the history of Taiwanese society, and some very complicated history. The amount of work it takes to properly convey these to a foreign audience made her feel like a “professional volunteer”.
While undertaking this translation, she consulted over a hundred books and dozens of scholarly articles. Not only did she consult Yang Ch’ien-ho’s The Season When Flowers Bloom, as well as representative literary texts from the time period, and studies on the railroad, but she also found
Shōwa era texts that proved invaluable for highlighting cultural touchpoints, as well as Japanese era maps and the Taiwanese daily newspaper of that time.
All of these sources were needed in the translation of a single sentence. When Aoyama is in Keelung, the original word states “That night she transferred to head toward JinShan hot springs.” In Japanese, the phrase “transfer” by itself is too unclear whether she is on public transportation, a train, or simply in a passenger car. Her editor worried Japanese readers would be confused by this sentence and asked for a revision. Miura scoured through her sources and found that the name of the public bus operating at that time was called Taiwan Coach. So she changed the sentence to reflect that historical reality.
Kim I-sak, for her part, had a similar experience. She is not only a translator but a novelist in her own right and is working on a piece that takes place in colonial Korea. So while she has done extensive research on Japanese colonialism on the Korean peninsula, she soon discovered that the Taiwanese experience diverged in significant ways. Japan used Taiwan as a launching pad into the rest of Southeast Asia, a colonial history not well-known in Korea. In order to faithfully convey the important historical backdrop of this novel, she had to carry out extensive research regarding the Pacific Theater in World War II.
Kim I-sak says that translating historical fiction cannot be thought of as simple rote translation, but that it requires extensive research on the part of the translator, or else there will be misreadings and misunderstandings.
Giving voice to the margins: the political sensitivities of translation
For Lin King, the impetus behind translating Taiwan Travelogue is intertwined with her personal identity. She was born in the United States and at one year old, her family returned to Taiwan where she grew up. When she was 18 she came back to the states for college and graduate school. In the about section on her website, she emphasizes that she is not just a Taiwanese-American, but holds citizenship in both places. This dual identity leads her to translate Taiwanese literature for an English speaking world, with particular sensitivity to “who speaks for whom”.
She began translating Taiwan Travelogue in 2022, right when the Russia-Ukraine war broke out. Living in America at the time, she came across a lot of people who empathized with the smaller Ukraine that was under attack. A lot of people said the politically correct things. But from the center of an imperial nation, it often came across as condescending. They discussed war, and they spoke well of the smaller, weaker nation, but it came from a perspective of someone who had never been threatened.
Because of this attitude, translating from places that have been colonized is still on the margins of the literary world and in itself is a political act. Taking Taiwanese literature and translating it into English is not just about letting a new batch of readers enjoy a good story, but rather, within the marketplace of languages, rejecting misunderstandings and being represented by those unfamiliar with the place. It is about establishing the narrative’s space in the world. Just like the novel’s exchange between Aizumi Misato, a Taiwanese-born Japanese employee for the provincial government, and Aoyama: even the well-intentioned colonizer can still view the colonized through a lens of condescension.
The translators of Taiwan Travelogue are not just success stories of a translation gone right, but rather represent the genuine weight that the translator holds. They must balance history, market desires, and politics to give life to something in a new language and culture.
Translations are not betrayals of the original work, but rather extend the life of the original. The Japanese version had to wrestle with the fictional “original language”, and the colonial backdrop of the novel; the English version was tasked with revealing the realities of colonialism to a readership who might not be accepting; the Korean edition interwove contemporary Taiwanese language with sensitive memories of a shared colonial past. To put it another way, from one seed, these three translations bloomed in three vibrant and unique ways.
- (のふた) translates to “two people”[↩]
- Shōwa refers to the reign of Emperor Hirohito[↩]
- Ok I’ll appear as translator for a second as the translator b/c the Translation of the word “Chinese” is so fraught and so freaking interesting. There is 中文 and 華語 which are often used interchangeably to mean “Chinese” but if you are speaking Cantonese and say 中文, you certainly mean something different than the Mandarin speaker using the same word. Whenever it appeared in this text I have translated it as “Chinese” or “Mandarin” while 國語 is another way of referring to Mandarin but literally means Country Language and has a more nationalistic element behind it. But here it is actually referring to Japanese because 國語 or country language during Japanese colonialism would refer to Japanese!
And to add another wrinkle, when Mainland Chinese use the term 普通話 (common language) they also mean Mandarin Chinese! But don’t use that term in Taiwan (I’ve made that mistake before haha)
I do think, however, that the way I have translated it in this text provides enough information for the reader to understand the fraught nature of choosing how to represent Chinese.[↩]
- Both way more appetizing than if she were to have directly translated it as “Chicken tube” (雞 = chicken, 管 = tube/pipe/way[↩]
- Regardless of what meat is used, it’s always called Koe-Kńg[↩]