History of translation from 1984 by George Orwell in the Chinese-speaking world

Abstract

There are today more than twenty Chinese translations of famous George Orwell’s novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four, and more than fifty different editions. Even if the novel was translated for the first
time into Chinese in 1950 in Taiwan, it was introduced officially in China only nearly thirty years
later. Each of the translations available today has its own specific historical context. In this paper, we propose to analyze the tumultuous history of translations and receptions of
Nineteen Eighty-Four in both China and Taiwan. In order to better understand the political, intellectual and literary contexts of these translations, our angle of approach will be that of the study of
the “paratext” of various Chinese-language versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The interpretation
of Nineteen Eighty-Four and particularly of the figure of Big Brother could be extremely different
regarding the socio-historical context and leads to radically different appropriations, maintaining
by the way the strength of the metaphorical ambiguity of the original novel.
This contribution will thus seek to explore the Sinophone representations and fantasies of this
major twentieth-century’s masterpiece and its impacts on Chinese and Taiwanese literary circles
during the past six decades.