Anthropomorphic animal in purposeful translations: The Call of the Wild in China

The humanity-animality entanglement in anthropomorphic animal protagonists has attracted scholarly attention from diverse perspectives. Focusing on translation as a purposeful activity, this study examines two reader-tailored Chinese translations of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903), in which Buck’s anthropomorphic configuration is reshaped in different ways. Through a case-specific analysis of the cover’s visual construction of Buck’s identity and the textual rendering of his brutal training and subsequent ferocity, the paper discusses how and why Buck’s humanity-animality blend is recalibrated. The findings reveal that, to advance socialist beliefs, the 1935 translation first humanizes Buck to enable working-class identification and then retains his wolf-dog combativeness as an exemplary model of resistance. By contrast, the 2005 translation, intended as a nature-friendly text for children, accentuates Buck’s animal identity to cultivate compassion toward mistreated animals while withdrawing depictions of how Buck survives in the wild to accommodate children’s sensitivities. Read against the duality of anthropomorphism, the reader-oriented remaking yields intriguing implications: the 1935 translation, albeit within an allegorical framework, facilitates a literary space for noting cross-species commonalities, whereas the 2005 rendition risks narrowing the horizon of multispecies engagement.