Selecting, rendering, positioning, circulating the lesser-known: an in-depth dialogue on Professor Milburn’s translation and research practice

As a British sinologist deeply engaged with Chinese culture, Professor Milburn has built her translation and research practice around relatively marginal subjects – the regional culture of Wu and Yue, ancient palace literature, and texts concerning socially marginalized groups – thereby cultivating a distinctive approach that balances the classical with the contemporary and integrates scholarly rigour with public readability. This interview examines the distinctiveness and representativeness of that practice through four questions that have long organised work in translation studies: what to translate, how to translate, who translates, and how translated texts circulate. The first three crystallise around three substantive tensions – canonical works versus niche themes, scholarly rigour versus public readability, and native cultural knowledge versus Western cognitive norms – while the fourth extends beyond them to the conditions under which a translation reaches readers at all. Throughout, Milburn argues that classical and contemporary translation practices feed into each other, and that niche themes offer an opportunity to introduce more balanced and nuanced representations of Chinese history and culture into public consciousness.