Self-Translation as Method

Modern Sinophone Self-Translators and their Transmediated Afterlives

By: Ursula Deser Friedman

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eText | 5 May 2026 | Edition Number 1

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This book explores the processes, aesthetics, and politics of literary self-translation and transmediation in the Sinophone world. This volume will be of interest to scholars in literary translation, translation studies, Sinophone studies, and world literature.

Self-translation is the process through which the authors translate their own writing into other languages, with transmediation taking this a step further by adapting works from one medium to another. This volume features longitudinal case studies of multicultural Sinophone writers' practices of self-translation and transmediation, charting seminal authors' lifelong adaption projects across language, media, and culture to elucidate processes of cultural transcreation. Friedman examines the works of eminent emigre Sinophone authors—Eileen Chang, Kenneth Pai, Ha Jin, and Regina Kanyu Wang—to better understand how they defamiliarize their own texts and memories through the acts of translating and revising their own writing, and how they write themselves into the historical trajectories of world literature. This book reveals fresh insights into the ways in which Sinophone self-translators and transmediators have mapped China onto the world and vice versa, creating cosmopolitan palimpsests in dialogue with diverse cultural traditions and expanding our understanding of the Sinophone.