This paper examines the translational journey of One Thousand and One Nights into the Chinese cultural context during the late Qing and early Republican periods, focusing on its reappropriation and reinterpretation by translators such as Zhou Guisheng and Zhou Zuoren. Through an analysis of The Fisherman and the Genie and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves in their respective Chinese adaptations—Arabian Nights’ Laughter and The Heroic Slave Girl—the study explores how these texts were imbued with new meanings and values to reflect the transformative currents of modern Chinese society.

Adopting Homi Bhabha’s theory of the "Third Space," the paper argues that translation served as a site of cultural hybridity where the original narratives were deconstructed, appropriated, and rehistoricized to align with Chinese intellectual and political agendas. Zhou Guisheng’s portrayal of The Fisherman and the Genie echoes the moralizing tone of traditional Chinese fables, transforming it into an allegory of social critique. Similarly, Zhou Zuoren’s adaptation of Ali Baba recasts the slave girl as a Chinese-style heroine, using her story as a metaphorical resistance against colonial oppression and feudal traditions.

By situating these translations within their historical and cultural milieus, the paper reveals how One Thousand and One Nights transcended its Arab origins to become a vehicle for political and cultural resistance in modern China. This study contributes to the understanding of cross-cultural flows and the transformative power of translation as a "Third Space" that challenges fixed notions of cultural identity while fostering new dialogues between the Middle East and East Asia.

The portrayal of women in South Asian literature, particularly in Bengali texts, is intricately shaped by socio-political, historical, and cultural contexts. In the digital age, Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially Large Language Models (LLMs), is increasingly employed for translating such complex narratives. However, AI-based translation systems face significant challenges in conveying the nuanced, gendered expressions and cultural subtleties that define the roles of women. This paper examines the limitations of AI in translating Bengali literature, focusing on its inability to accurately represent female agency, resistance, and identity in works like Rabindranath Tagore’s Naukadubi (The Boat Wreck), Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084), and Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja (Shame). These texts feature women who confront patriarchal norms and embody evolving identities within a socially dynamic environment.

AI translation systems often fail to capture the intersectionality of gender, class, and socio-political oppression inherent in these works. For instance, Tagore’s nuanced depiction of female characters navigating both gendered and class-based struggles in Naukadubi often becomes oversimplified due to AI’s reliance on generalized training data. Similarly, Devi’s portrayal of maternal resilience amid political unrest in Hajar Churashir Ma is reduced to surface-level translations, missing the emotional and socio-political depth crucial to understanding the female experience. This failure risks erasing the complexity of women’s voices or reinforcing stereotypical representations.

The paper emphasizes the irreplaceable role of human translators, whose cultural and gendered insights are essential for preserving the integrity of these literary works. By incorporating human expertise, especially in capturing emotional and cultural nuances, translations can better reflect the lived experiences of women. A collaborative model, where AI’s computational efficiency supports human translators’ cultural sensitivity, can produce more accurate and contextually rich translations, ensuring that marginalized voices, particularly those of women, are faithfully represented in global literary discourse.

One of the promised benefits of the internet and AI tools is the democratization of information: they seem to make the world’s knowledge available to anyone with a web browser and suggest that anyone can become a translator by relying on the extensive resources they offer. But as the limitations and dangers of LLMs have become more apparent, it is increasingly clear that users, especially college students, need careful guidance in using these tools in ethical and effective ways. As Wharton professors Ethan and Lilach Mollick have argued, teachers can help students use LLMs to learn evaluative skills and become more attentive readers and writers. José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson repeatedly emphaisize in their book Teaching with AI that AI tools are most effective when coupled with thoughtful reflection and expert mentoring. This is as true for translation as for other skills, especially given the ways that LLM-assisted translations can both challenge and perpetuate biases and existing power dynamics. This paper outlines specific methods for helping college students learn how to create, evaluate, revise, and reflect on AI-supported translations that balance fidelity to language and meaning with awareness of the ethical concerns that such translations can and should raise. I will share the experiences of my students (at a large public American university in a conservative Western state) with LLM-assisted translation as they moved through a sequence of assignments that builds from comparing existing translations of a text, then engaging with the original source (using AI translation as necessary), evaluating LLM-assisted translation results, revising prompts for AI-based translations, evaluating new results, and reflecting on the process throughout. Mentoring students through this sequence can help them become not only more effective translators but also more ethical and self-aware technology consumers inside and outside of the academic setting.

The term "influence" in English comes from Old French "influence," which means "emanation from the stars that acts upon one's character and destiny" (13th C). Mediaeval Latin ‘influentia’ means ‘a flow of water, a flowing in.’ France is where the ‘idea of littérature comparée’ became a necessary and full-fledged discipline, and the institutional establishment there is based on the concept of ‘influence’ which lies at the intersection of ‘relations’ and ‘inspirations.’ Initially the French School of Comparative Literature focussed on the contributions of French literary texts and authors to other European literatures and vice versa, so it's easy to see the implicit colonialist project in its formation. The present paper will question how, through the rise of ‘la littérature comparée,’ the French language, literature, authors, texts and culture played the role of ‘emitter,’ which was acting upon the European character and destiny, which would further ‘flow into’ the veins of colonial territory and like water, a regenerative force, attempting invigoration of the ‘stagnated’ literary culture through generic influence, literary morphology and cultural imitation.

René Wellek's 1958 address “The Crisis in Comparative Literature” and René Étiemble's 1963 monograph "Comparaison n'est pas raison" opened the floodgates to using ‘crisis’ and ‘anxiety’ as starting points for Comparative Literature discussions. This research will examine Wellek and Étiemble's political historical contexts—the totalitarian regime in Germany during World War II and the political crisis in France during the Algerian War of Independence—to determine how their comments on the discipline's vulnerability were influenced. Ulrich Weisstein's patronage of "Comparative Arts," Susan Bassnett's switch to "Translation Studies," and Gayatri Spivak's intellectual investment in "Planetarity" will be examined in the paper, along with institutional/disciplinal politics and Comparative Literature's crisis.

The present paper will also look at the beginning of the disciplinal journey of Comparative Literature in India by investigating the literary history of the establishment of the first Department of Comparative Literature in India as well as in Asia at Jadavpur University in 1956 and trace how the American School of Comparative Literature impacted Buddhadeva Bose during his teaching tenure at Pennsylvania College for Women. Taking inferences from the above-mentioned critical investigations across French, American and Indian schools of Comparative Literature, I will argue that it is time to question the over-generalizations of terms like ‘inter-disciplinary’ and ‘in-disciplinary’ especially in the present decade. This research acknowledges the inevitable presence of ‘binary pitfalls’ in ‘comparison’ and argues to explore fluidity as a conceptual metaphor to understand the ‘in-comparative’ framework.