Translation is inherently comparative as its production, distribution, consumption, and reception involve cross-cultural and inter-linguistic negotiation and transformation – i.e. it is a network of operations, which are dialogic, and sometimes even confrontational.

Comparative Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS) has gained currency in the 21st century due to three reasons: our Internet-influenced increasing encounter with cultural diversities, the commercial potentialities that translation activities including Machine Translation cover, and the emergence of decolonial/ postcolonial perspectives that identify and question the dominance of a couple of European languages in the planetary translation activities.

An updated version of a 2020 paper, this paper broaches three issues related to comparative translation: first, a comparative analysis of “interpreting” (interpreter translating orally) and “translation” (translator translating or interpreting written texts); second, comparing different translations (from print to subtitle) of a single text (e.g. Hamlet); and, third, critical exploration of the domination of European theories of translation in Translation and Interpreting Studies and explores if exposure to non-European translation theories can be proved beneficial. It is in these changing contexts that the present paper explores the increasing effectiveness of CTIS in the 21st century. It intends to underscore which standpoint may serve planetary translation activities in the 21st century and whether ‘rebabelizing’ the world (Annie Brisset) in this increasingly mulit-logue globalectic world.

For Oustinoff, Lushenkova-Foscolo, and Rasse, contemporary lingual nomadicity and incommunication have given rise to what Salman Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands named “translated men.” Acknowledging that “something always gets lost in translation,” Rushdie “cling[s], obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.” Comparative Translation theorists advocate rebabilizing the world. In this age of globalization and multiculturalism, the maintenance of “global linguistic diversity” is promoted, on one hand, to develop “cultural diversity”; on the other, trans-national and inter-lingual interaction has been increasing. What is, therefore, needed is making the translation flow balanced and participatory – no absolute dominance of one or two languages, no deletion of the ‘minority’ languages. It is a rebabelized world – a world of many yet communicative and understanding.

Nellie Campobello published her fragmentary, violent, and unabashedly villista book of heavily autobiographical short fiction—Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el norte de México—in 1931. She then released a much longer version of the text as a second edition in 1940. A few of Campobello’s poems were published in English translation during her lifetime, but the vignettes or estampas from Cartucho would have to wait until 1988, two years after her death, when they were translated by Doris Meyer and published by the University of Texas Press. However, Langston Hughes translated four of Campobello’s estampas (three from Cartucho and one from the later collection Las manos de mama) which remain unpublished but are available to read and study via a digitized archive at Yale University. Hughes performed these translations in the mid-1930s, between the release of the two editions of Cartucho. During this decade, the Mexican Revolution was still in Mexico’s very recent past and the task of reclaiming Francisco Villa as a hero for all Mexicans was still very much on Campobello’s mind.

In this presentation, I begin to offer a hypothetical translation history for Campobello’s Cartucho, asking the question—what would this book’s translation future (or, the book’s trajectory in the English-speaking world) have been like if Hughes had published his translations? I offer a comparative study of the four estampas Hughes translated—what he titles “From our Window,” “My Little Sister,” “Make Them Out of Clay,” and “He Was Bad to Mama”—alongside Campobello’s source texts and Meyer’s translations to offer an alternative translation history of what Cartucho might have been in English. I examine how Hughes changes the pieces by significantly altering three of their four titles and by combining the four stand-alone estampas into one work that he called “Through the Eyes of a Child.” I also consider how these works are situated in Hughes’s larger proposed but never published anthology of Spanish American writers. Hughes’s translation and editing choices alter the texts at the fundamental levels of framing and genre—the new titles reframe the individual pieces, and in Hughes’s broader anthology of translations from Mexico and Cuba, the unwieldy estampas become something more recognizable as a short story. Hughes’s unpublished translations of Campobello exemplify what Karen Emmerich describes as “translingual editing” and create something that is every bit as original as a source text. Studying these digitized archival materials expands our understanding of Hughes’s work as a translator and mediator between Mexico and the United States, and it offers a hypothetical possibility for a different reception of Campobello’s Cartucho in the English-language literary marketplace. In his versions of Campobello’s estampas, Hughes emerges as a consummate author-translator willing to put his creative imprint on Campobello’s revisionary home-front portraits of the Mexican Revolution.

Two hundred years ago, the great German Romantic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe coined the term "world literature" (Weltliteratur) in commenting on the reception abroad of translations of his works into other European languages and on the translation into European languages of Asian classics. Across the same period and into the twentieth century, English spread as the lingua franca. Hence, many non-English-speaking writers want to learn English, have their works translated into English, or both. Such a one is Xie Hong, a Western-influenced contemporary Chinese writer who has lived in New Zealand and has begun writing in English. My co-translator Jicheng Sun and I are rendering his Chinese short stories into an English collection, making our project an East-West collaboration on East-West literature. We have relied on a system whereby Dr Sun performs the rough translations of the stories, which are then polished by me, Dr Swindall. We then collaborate on the proofing and preparation for submission of the stories. Although our use of current translation technologies is limited, we have nonetheless published several of the stories individually in reputable literary journals. We achieve this by paying attention to Xie’s minimalist style, which he claims is influenced by Hemingway, as well as the funny-sad themes of Xie’s work depicting the complications of life for ordinary Chinese in Shenzhen from the 1980s to the 2010s. To render Xie’s style, we first perform a close reading which aligns with Damion Searle’s assertion that translation is “the kind of reading a translator is doing …. when we translate [a] book, we translate our reading of the original.” Our reading of Xie’s stories derives in large part from our personal relationships with him and what he has told us he is attempting. This can be summarized as depicting what has been called the “ultra-unreal reality” of Chinese society today as it constantly changes, especially in Xie’s hometown of Shenzhen, where his stories are mostly set. As a boy, however, Xie claims his favorite reading was Sherlock Holmes, whose “logic, suspense, and detective elements” are evident in his mature writing. Now, he declares that he desires to present “Chinese stories by a Chinese writer” to anglophone readers. Therefore, we make Xie’s ironic narratives of the quests for truth of his protagonists readable in English in all their quite real unreality, showing aspects of the lives of ordinary Chinese probably unknown to most in the West. As contributions to twenty-first-century world literature, our translations make the experiences of today’s China accessible to a global audience that can read English, promoting international understanding and, possibly, identification with others far away.

Johannes Fabian's book Time and the Other urges for 'coevalness' among anthropology’s objects of study. Changing the title’s focus on the gender of the ‘Other’, this paper deals with questions of euphemisms and invisible significations, which one has to deal with while translating Sibylle Berg’s gender discourse present in her four-play series ‘Menschen with Problemen’ into Urdu. These plays are adorned with the West’s cultural pessimism and the gender discourse of contemporary European society. A translation of this kind becomes a linguistic undertaking on the intersections of time, modernity’s progress in Europe, and the post-colonial Global South. This is also an epistemic engagement with the concepts of time and gender. As the understanding of progress, with European standards of the teleological approach to history, often leads to broken forms of engagement with the absence or presence of a concept, in translational engagements of the plays mentioned above, this brokenness manifests itself as problems related to gender vis a vis language like Urdu.

Particular concerns can be raised as to how the 'storm of progress' a la Walter Benjamin functions in post-colonial societies with fragmented pasts and how this phenomenon manifests itself, especially concerning gender-based concepts, such as the question of pronouns and the usage of slang in "high" literature? This paper deals with translation problems in light of these questions.

Yiyun Li has been a prominent Chinese American writer who has produced eight fictions since 2003. She was originally known for her fusion of Chinese elements into her English writing, while for her latest collection published last year, the Anglophone critics start to appreciate its theme and narration, rather than its Chinese-ness. This research endeavors to look through the transformation of Yiyun Li’s writing, ranging from its theme, characterization, to its language style, and particularly, its transition from translation literature to writing for global English readers. The representations of changes, the reasons behind it, and a comparison between she and Geling Yan in terms of their Chinese-ness in their works, will comprise the complete project. There has been research from scholars on Li’s language style, but the focus has been mainly on the Chinese-ness shown in her works before 2018. Therefore, this research would be the first one that could be found pertaining to Li’s 21-year publishing career, from ‘A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’ to ‘Wednesday’s Child’. The methodology of literary linguistics derived from Geoffrey Leech’s ‘Style in Fiction: a Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose’ will be employed to present more detailed and objective evidence.