Expanding translation: A text map of new youth (1915-1918)

This article offers a digital visualization of textual relations of translation of the first four volumes of New Youth, a leading journal in early twentieth-century China. Translation in New Youth has long been considered as a pivotal medium for the importation of modern Western literature and scholarship. This assumption, however plausible, is generally based on selected texts in the journal that were complete or abridged renditions of Western canonical writings. For a more comprehensive view of translation in New Youth, this article expands the scope of study to include various types of “unmarked” translations, such as in-text notes and citations that were renditions of segments and fragments of foreign texts. To gauge the diverse translations in their immediate context, the study records the translations, their sources, and the items published in proximity to them, then processes the textual relations into a network graph using the data visualization tool Gephi. The structured storage of data in the text map allows translations to be contextualized in various text milieu; it also enables a macroscopic view of the sources of knowledge of the journal in this period, which reveals signs of randomness and rupture in the journal’s selection of materials for translation. The observation challenges existing scholarship that depicts New Youth translation as a consistent, strategic practice that foregrounded Chinese literary modernity. Copyright © 2018 Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.