Foreign culture, foreign style

Western translation theorists have written very little on Chinese to English literary translation. This article proposes that this is a gap waiting to be filled - that the choices facing translators wishing to make Chinese fiction readable in English are different both quantitatively and quantitatively from those facing English translators from most other European languages. I argue that any examination Chinese and English literary language from the translator's point of view needs to start from the very structure of the language, and that there is a continuum of differences which encompass a broad spectrum of features of stale and even of literary conventions. in this article, I look at how theories of translation across cultures can shed light on this process and at strategies adopted by other Chinese to English literary translators.