Hybridization has become a fluid notion due to its association with ideas and themes that were once mutual contradicting but have now become mutual celebrated. However, such changes are inevitable as the trend of globalization continuously generates new transnational cultural elements. This study will examine the hybrid cultural identity in Disney’s animated film Mulan (1998) which was adapted from The Ballad of Mulan, a folktale that originated from China. Specifically, it focuses on the cultural identity of Disney’s Mulan and explores how it is reconstructed as a transnational culture which flowed from China to America. This phenomenon, to some extent, implies the West’s increasing acceptance of cultural productions from Asian countries. The paper employs Daphne A. Jameson’s analytic model of cultural identity consisting of vocation, class, geography, philosophy, language, and biological components which seek to examine the emergence of mixed and relational and hybrid cultural identities. Through this study, the paper aims to discuss how the process of hybridization brings the character’s cultural identity in the original folklore to an international audience and how this facilitates cultural exchange and growth. The findings show that hybridization in cultural identity presents a tension between cultural Americanization and orientalization as well as modernity and tradition, which ultimately leads to a transferable cultural identity. The study is significant in elevating the status of Chinese folktales and highlighting cultural hybridity as a mediating factor in the growing trend of cultural globalization.
Translated children’s works from English to Chinese have flooded China unprecedentedly since the end of the 19PthP century. However, there is a discrepancy in the translation of Chinese children’s works into the English language. This is maybe because western scholars are still largely ignoring Asian texts for young readers. Therefore, the research aims to fill the gap in the scholarship by studying the translated Bronze and Sunflower, which is a renowned work written by the Chinese first Hans Christian Anderson winner Cao Wenxuan, from the aspect of narrative space. A qualitative approach is adopted to compare the similarities and differences of narrative space between the source text and the target text. The samples will be taken from Cao Wenxuan’s Bronze and Sunflower and its English translation. The textual analysis is illuminated through the narratological framework, which is based on three-layered space: The topographic level, the chronotopic level and the textual level. The study explores how narrative space is constructed in the process of translating Bronze and Sunflower. It is hoped that the findings of the study will show how space is created in a different languagea, and that the translator prefers to change the narrative space rather than keeping the same spatial structure in the target text.
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