Visiting elements thought to be “inactive”: non-human actors in Arthur Waley’s translation ofJourney to the West

Abstract

His research interest mainly focuses on contemporary translation theories and empirical translation studies. He has published widely in translation journals, such as Babel, Perspectives, Translation & Interpreting Studies, and Across Languages and Cultures. He has co-edited a special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies entitled "Towards a Comparative Studies of Translation and Interpreting Studies". 2 Visiting elements thought to be "inactive": Non-human actors in Arthur Waley's translation of Journey to the West This paper applies actor-network theory (ANT) to study the non-human agents that participate in the translation and publication process of Monkey, an English translation of the Chinese classic Xi You Ji. The materials used consist mainly of the letters exchanged between the publisher George Allen & Unwin, the translator Arthur Waley, and the jacket and title page designer Duncan Grant. Moreover, the "Preface" of the translation written by the translator himself and the publisher's autobiography are referenced as additional sources of information. The research reveals two groups of entities which act as what ANT scholars term as "nonhuman actors". The first group consists of texts, more specifically, the "Preface" to Monkey and some letters exchanged between Waley as a translator and Unwin as a publisher, which reveals the reasons of re-translating Monkey and the translation strategy used. The second group includes the Second World War and the influenza epidemic in the 1940s that impeded the reprinting of Monkey. The paper concludes that, in addition to human actors, non-human actors that have also actively exerted influences on both the process and the outcome of a major translation project deserve to receive more attention when looking at translation as a social activity.

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“…Indeed, Waley hoped to convey the heroic spirit of the protagonist via translation to the British public. Whereas the war extended throughout the production and the reprints of Monkey , the stocks of the book kept running out, and hence, it was reprinted 4 times during the war alone (Luo & Zheng, 2017, p. 9). With regard to Timothy, quite a few researchers studied the topic of conflation of Christianity with the original Buddhist allegory (Hu & Wang, 2014; Ouyang & Mu, 2017).…”

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