Narration and re-narration: a case study on the translation of Wuhan diary

Abstract

After the city of Wuhan in central China was locked down by authorities to stem the spread of the virus that caused the then-mysterious respiratory disease now known as COVID-19, renowned local writer Fang Fang began recording her daily life in the form of posts on Weibo, WeChat and other social media platforms. These posts, 60 in total, collectively became known as the “Fang Fang Diary” and was translated into English in a remarkable 46 days as Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City.

Equally remarkable were the controversies and conflicts spawned by its translation into English. This dissertation examines the events surrounding the translation of Wuhan Diary through the lens of narrativity. After identifying the translator’s ideologies and agendas, as well as the collective narratives circulating in the target culture, it is found that textual and paratextual manipulations by the translator and publisher reframe the narratives presented in the ST in a manner highly consistent with their professed agendas and the collective public narratives circulating in the target culture.

A contrastive analysis reveals a variety of inconsistencies between the original Chinese and the translated English texts that are indicative of the re-narration process. In commensuration, these divergences demonstrate that the translation prizes ideological coherence with the collective narratives in the target culture over equivalence and strict fidelity to the source text. The cumulative outcome of these many manipulations, subtle or otherwise, is the emergence of a narrative framed in terms at odds with the author’s narrative location. At the macro-level, the translation has failed to achieve narrative equivalence.