Literary Translators’ Brand-Building in Contemporary Chinese-English Translation

This book builds on emerging research into the human dimension of literary translators to illuminate how translators can construct and project their brands. Focusing on contemporary Chinese-English literary translators, it examines the evolution and impact of their brand-building within the global literary translation landscape.

Zhang deftly integrates research on branding from marketing, management, and publishing studies, and the sociology of translation to develop an innovative framework for understanding the literary translator’s brand. This framework approaches brand-building on three interrelated levels: intra-field (brand input), inter-field (brand investment), and inter-cultural (brand reception) levels. It offers a novel analytical lens that complements and differs from existing tools used to examine literary translators’ presence, such as visibility, translator-function, the translator’s professional status, and celebrity translators. As applied to the case of three prominent figures in the field of contemporary Chinese-English literary translation, Howard Goldblatt, Nicky Harman, and Ken Liu, the approach elucidates the multifaceted role literary translators play beyond the translation process and the power of their brand names in the international literary exchanges.

The book highlights the possibilities for new research on literary translators’ brand-building in other contexts and the fruitfulness of an interdisciplinary approach to literary translation more broadly. This volume will be of interest to scholars in literary translation, sociology of translation, publishing studies, and contemporary Chinese literature.