Who has the final say? English translation of online lockdown writing Wuhan Diary

Abstract

As a testimony to the lockdown life in Wuhan caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary received worldwide attention while triggering extensive controversies in China. Drawing on the concepts of agent and voice in translation studies, this article explores the contextual, paratextual and textual voices of translation agents in the English translation of Wuhan Diary (2020) and their power negotiations, to reveal who has the final say in positioning and rendering the text for an Anglophone readership. In so doing, the article shows that the author rather than the publisher plays a decisive role in producing the paratextual materials for the translation, and that the translator tend to employ the translation technique of omission to protect the author and himself. Furthermore, it finds that the author’s request for the revision of such paratexts as the title and blurb, in conjunction with the translator’s technique of omission in the translated text, boil down to responses to the critical voices from Chinese readers. Therefore, this article argues that the critical voices from Chinese readers have had the final say in the production and presentation of the English translation of Wuhan Diary.