Strategies for Chinese Fantasy and Kung Fu Novels to Go Global: Taking Sage Monarch as an Example

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201215.377How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Chinese fantasy novels, Sage Monarch, domestication

Abstract

The past five years has seen a dramatic rise of online Chinese fantasy and kung fu novels (hereafter called Chinese fantasy novels), or xianxia novels, both for domestic readers and readers overseas. The novels, characterized by their Chinese flavor, are so popular among foreigners that many English native speakers dive in as translators on websites like Wuxiaworld. Why did the English versions on the Wuxiaworld website gain so much popularity? This paper tries to take the version of Sage Monarch on it as an example and report on its language features and readability with the help of SEO, a tool for text analysis, in addition to an investigation into its translation strategies. The result shows its translator has turned to domestication for readability and foreignization for novelty, with the former being predominant, which helps explain why it has mesmerized a widespread readership in the receptor language.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jiangxia Yang
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/18
TI  - Strategies for Chinese Fantasy and Kung Fu Novels to Go Global: Taking Sage Monarch as an Example
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 468
EP  - 471
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201215.377
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201215.377
ID  - Yang2020
ER  -