Politics of Translation: The Wife of Bath’s Tale in Chinese in the Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT This article studies the politics of translation in two Chinese versions of the Wife of Bath’s Tale in the early twentieth century. Lin Shu and Zhou Zuoren were members of two different schools in the New Culture Movement, and their distinct translation theories and methods reflected their diverse cultural and political concerns in the socially transitional period. Lin Shu’s translation of the tale (1917) as a yu yan reinforced native Chinese cultural tradition, while Zhou Zuoren’s rendering of the tale (1935) as an example of “human literature” remapped Western modernity. The difference between Lin Shu’s reformist and Zhou Zuoren’s revolutionary approaches indicates that translation was an important political practice and a means of exploration of cultural transformation and social criticism.