Transactional Translation: Subjectivity, Voice, and Justice in Two Transpacific Exchanges

This essay uses “transactional translation” to refer to a conscious translation practice that recognizes, discriminates, and actively engages with the power dynamics, cultural contexts, and historical relationships between the source and target languages. Two transpacific examples of translation from the early 1870s are analyzed in light of the concept of transactional translation: a Chinese translation of a New York Herald report on displaced Chinese coolies in Cuba that appeared in the Hong Kong newspaper The Chinese Mail (Xianggang Huazi ribao), and a newly escaped Chinese coolie’s story translated into English by the Chinese American Wong Chin Foo (1847–1898) and published in The New York Times. Those two translation examples demonstrate the translators’ agency in navigating racial encounters, unequal power relationships, and displacement within different events and contexts of transpacific exchanges. They both show how translators actively negotiate their positions within power structures and reconfigure historical narratives and identities in cross-cultural encounters through a kind of transactional translation.