Translating China : a semiotic reading of Linda Jaivin's The Empress Lover

For Australian writers like Nicholas Jose, setting a novel in China is relevant to Australia because it is translating an unfamiliar culture for Australian readers thus doing the country an important service. Linda Jaivin’s second China novel The Empress Lover has an Australian translator as its protagonist translating Chinese films. This chapter investigates how translation extends from this literal sense to permeate the book at the intralingual, and intersemiotic levels as well (Jakobson 1959). The novel presents a translated Chinese narrator telling his side of the 1989 Beijing story in English. The protagonist is dedicated to writing a book about contemporary China, reorganizing materials put together through the story of each of her friends and acquaintances and translating them into her own language. As a self-consciously translational novel, it uses a different combination of the Jakobsonian levels of translation for each story and confronts the difficulties and problematics of translation at different levels. Translation in the novel is related to the act as listening and care for the other. The Empress Lover is filled with such gestures from its Australian protagonist and the novelist herself. They speak a different kind of humanism from their predecessors, not the humanism of identity, but of otherness. A truly transcultural novel can only be based on emotional involvement, on partaking in the culture of the other.