Workshops

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2025 marked the 160 StartFragment ^th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has been translated into over 170 languages. Translation, a form of rereading and rewriting, is a complex negotiation between two cultures. This workshop will use selected back-translations of passages from ‘A Mad Tea-Party’ published in Alice in a World of Wonderlands; The Translations of Lewis Carroll's Masterpiece (2015) to think through questions such as 1) what has been translated? 2) when was it translated and how? 3) why was it translated in this way? 4) How do the translators deal with the word play, puns, poetry, parodied verses, jokes which involve logic, cultural and historical references in the book? We will explore factors must be taken into consideration in the process of translation, such as gender, colonialism, globalization, and other cultural and political issues.

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Translation aims to make the foreign familiar to its target audience through interlingual rendition. But what happens when a literary text deliberately incorporates strangeness as a misfit within its storyworld to create a surprise effect? How can the strange, the curious, the bizarre, the absurd, or the nonsensical be translated in a way that renders it comprehensible while preserving its radical otherness and singular difference? This challenge is heightened by the fact that the notion of strangeness is a historically and culturally shifting concept, yet one that remains rooted in the timeless patterns of Jungian archetypes and the tradition of the grotesque. The representation of strangeness provokes cognitive dissonance, affective ambiguity, and a curious fusion of fear and fascination—often culminating in a sense of disorientation and perplexed laughter. Since the translator’s task is to reproduce the comic effect, the workshop aims to explore how humor theories—Freud’s psychoanalytical understanding of jokes, Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, Bergson’s reflections on theatrical laughter, and feminist or queer theories on the political potential of parody—may assist in translating strangeness. Strategies may include domestication or foreignization, shifts to poetic registers, and playful manipulation through the proliferation or depletion of meanings. We will focus on selected texts by Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl to trace instances of strangeness and examine creative ways of adapting them across languages, cultures, and media. Participants will address a wide range of topics, including the visual translation of strangeness, imagological perspectives, the interplay of stereotypes and neologisms, the ethics of translation in light of political correctness, and the commodification of the funcanny.

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As an emerging multimodal genre in children’s literature, Chinese original graphic novels have become increasingly popular because of their pronounced aesthetic features and educational functions to young readers. However, when crossing national borders, Chinese graphic novels have posed serious challenges to translators since the cultural contexts in the source texts are not easy to incorporate by the cognitive frames of the target readers. To investigate how translations remove linguistic, cultural, and cognitive barriers and develop more inclusive children’s literature in the global market, we explore the case study of My Beijing: Four Stories of Everyday Wonder, the English translation of a well-read Chinese graphic novel (老街的童话). We tend to argue that adequate recontextualization promotes the reception of the source text in the target culture. It is pivotal for translators to recontextualize the multimodal text to weave a web of meanings by synergizing the message in the written text and the semiotic background of pictures for its recipients in different cultures. analyzing the target text based on Van Leeuwen and Wodak’s typology of transformation and other theories of translation studies, we found four strategies (conservation, reorganization, substitution, and addition) used in the recontextualization of graphic novels can the fuller reception by the target audience.

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