Negotiating Cultural Hegemony in Translation: An Integrated Narrative-and-Strategy Analysis of Flowers in the Mirror

HRMARS - The translation of culturally embedded terms in Li Jiuzhen’s Flowers in the Mirror presents a critical site for negotiating cultural hegemony. This study examines how cultural-hegemonic narratives, encoded in specific lexicons, are transferred in English translation and to what ideological effect. It develops an integrated framework utilizing Mona Baker’s narrative theory to categorize these words and Javier Franco Aixelá’s taxonomy of translation strategies to analyze their micro-level treatment. Analysis reveals a tendency for strategies like naturalization to dilute source-cultural narratives, whereas selective foreignization preserves subversive alterity. The study concludes that translational choices are acts of ideological negotiation, and proposes this narrative-strategy model as a replicable tool for critically examining power dynamics in literary translation.