CARLOS TEE is Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Translation & Interpretation, National Taiwan Normal University. A three-time recipient of the Liang Shih-chiu Literary Prize for Translation, he has a PhD in Comparative Literature (specialization in Literary Translation Studies, Narratology and James Joyce's "Ulysses") from Fu Jen Catholic University. Before joining NTNU, he was full-time Asst. Professor at National Taiwan University and also taught in an adjunct capacity at Fu Jen's graduate program in T&I. He has published a number of translated books on Neoconfucian philosophy, Chinese archaic jade and porcelain as well as journal papers on Comparative literature, Translation Theory and the English translation of stream of consciousness in James Joyce’s Ulysses Supervisors: Prof. Chang Han-liang, Fudan University and Prof. Nicholas Koss, Peking University Phone: +8862953952143
”Lestrygonians” is one of the most challenging episodes in ”Ulysses” owing to its allusive depth ... more ”Lestrygonians” is one of the most challenging episodes in ”Ulysses” owing to its allusive depth and extraordinary wit. Descriptions of the aroma and images of food, the pungent associations they conjure up in the ”thoughtful” mind of Bloom, once juxtaposed with interior monologues showing his disturbing anxiety over Molly's infidelity, easily contribute to the difficulty of understanding the text of the episode. In this initial style, the frequent use of short psycho-narration passages reminds us of the narrator's presence through brief narrative introductions of on-going actions and scenarios in the narrative. These introductions and the need to present the inner thoughts of characters make possible the splicing of psycho-narration with monologues, and for the narrator's adoption of figural voice, both of which complicate reading and translation. In this paper, these issues on the interpretation of the episode's textual structure are studied by comparing the two Chinese translations with Joyce's original. How the initial style in ”Lestrygonians,” when combined with the food theme, interfered with reading and translation is studied from the narratological point of view using Dorrit Cohn's methodology of classifying acts of the mind.
Spectrum: Studies in Language, Literature, Translation, and Interpretation, Vol. 15(2). 17-38, 2020
The stream of consciousness mode is a key feature of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Xiao Qian and Wen... more The stream of consciousness mode is a key feature of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo have turned a blind eye on this as they followed a more socio-political strategy to drop Joyce’s psychological modes altogether from their translation. Xiao and Wen have a reason for choosing said strategy despite Xiao’s familiarity with the technique. Several factors forced them to drop the stream of consciousness mode in favor of a politically-correct format. After all, historical developments did not allow literary Modernism to thrive and Ulysses to be accepted in 20th–century China. The quarrel between the leftists and the rightists among men of literature contributed to this negative atmosphere. Then, the rise of communism made things even worse with the state’s subsequent coercion of writers and translators to toe the official line. But perhaps the single most determining factor was the Cultural Revolution and its attendant atrocities. Xiao was labeled a rightist, purged by Mao’s Red Guards, banished to a Chinese gulag, and was forbidden from writing after his release. Political persecution made him extra cautious, and their decision to jettison Joyce’s stream of consciousness mode is understandable. In Translation and Conflict, Mona Baker brings forward the concept of “selective appropriation,” which she argues to be evident in patterns of omission and addition that are traceable in the target text itself. Relevant historical events, personal accounts from Xiao and Wen, as well as more recent studies by PRC scholars show that their strategy of purging the stream of consciousness technique altogether from their translation is a classic example of selective appropriation resulting from self-censorship, of adopting a translation strategy in consideration of political reality. This paper examines Xiao and Wen’s translation strategy by comparing sample excerpts, and provides a historical account of decisive historical events.
Spectrum: Studies in Language, Literature, Translation, and Interpretation, 2018
This paper discusses the motifs of sound and music in the “Sirens” episode of James Joyc... more This paper discusses the motifs of sound and music in the “Sirens” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and how they actually interfere with reading when put side-by-side with stream of consciousness passages. In “Sirens,” Joyce puts emphasis on playful phrasings and the disruption of conventional syntactical patterns done so as to enhance prose rhythm needed for musical effect. In this episode, Bloom’s interior monologues are no longer presented in extended passages. Instead, they are integrated into the narrative and often juxtaposed with dialogue and psycho-narration. Over and above these narratological changes, the density with which rhythm, sound, music and song lyrics are included makes reading of this episode quite formidable for a reader with an ear untrained in the innuendos of sound and musical patterns embedded in literary texts, more so for a translator who has to render the story into another language. To better show how the text is read and understood, excerpts from the two translated Chinese versions by Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo, and by Jin Di are compared with Joyce’s original.
Through these comparisons, we realize that Joyce adopts playful phrasings that often disrupt conventional syntax while having a specific musical or rhythmic effect in mind, giving more emphasis on the achievement of the latter at the expense of syntactic and semantic intelligibility. The necessary consequence of such a reversal is that Joyce substantially reduced the rationality, or readability, of his extravagant prose.
This paper focuses on the autonomous monologue technique in the last episode of Ulysses, " Penelo... more This paper focuses on the autonomous monologue technique in the last episode of Ulysses, " Penelope, " and how it affects reading and translation. After getting acquainted with psycho-narration, narrated monologue and quoted monologue, as well as their various combinations in many of the preceding chapters of Ulysses, a reader faces a totally different perspective and format in this very last episode. " Penelope " is the only instance in the novel where the authorial voice is totally obliterated by the figural voice all throughout the episode. There is absolutely no sign of an omniscient storyteller's presence nor are there echoes of an overt narrative voice. Autonomous monologue is the most extreme form of stream of consciousness and the purest. In this episode, Molly tells her story by drawing from her memories of the past and her present circumstances, and her flights of fancy often touch on unexplained allusions to circumstances and details from the other Ulysses episodes. This makes reading " Penelope " all the more challenging, and when thought-representational aspects related to autonomous monologue, as well as the absence of punctuation, exacerbate the difficulty of interpreting Molly's mental excursions, the obstacles to a clear, unequivocal reading are multiplied. Reading virtually overlaps with decoding in the translation process, including the process of translation of this episode by the two teams of Chinese translators who adopted different translation strategies. The first part of this paper discusses the various expressive, textual and stylistic aspects of " Penelope " — which contribute to the difficulty of reading the text—as a prelude to the study of how the two Chinese translators interpreted " Penelope " —including the hurdles they had to overcome and the limitations of the translation strategies they adopted.
Lawrence Venuti's discourse on domesticating and foreignizing translation harks back some two hun... more Lawrence Venuti's discourse on domesticating and foreignizing translation harks back some two hundred years ago to a speech by the Prussian hermeneutician Friedrich Schleiermacher. This paper is a critique of Venuti's genealogies of Schleiermacher's original ideas on translation. Discussion focuses on several major issues. Venuti's discourse, swayed by his Post-colonialist emphasis on Foucaultian genealogies, laments Schleiermacher's choice of the educated class in pushing for the formation of a new national culture as " elitist ". Considering the condition of Prussia two centuries ago, this paper argues that Schleiemacher's proposed approach was the right course of action. Any social movement of the literary and cultural kind has to begin somewhere from the upper classes, from where the ideas spread to the general public. It is in the periphery of the semiosphere where strain leads to dynamism, and it is where the hotspot of real action is, as Yuri Lotman would assert. Venuti writes at length to expound on his dislike for the textual and psychological requirements for interpretation as proposed by Schleiermacher. For Schleiermacher, the relationship between the grammatical and the psychological is not static but rather dynamic since each one cannot lead to a complete understanding, and therefore, it is necessary to move back and forth between the two sides in an endless process of comparison and contrasting before the reader eventually arrives at a definite interpretation. While Schleiermacher's psychological mode faced criticisms from some hermeneuticians, none of his critics, including Hans-Georg Gadamer, really upheld semantic autonomy in textual exegesis in an absolutist manner. Rather, they believed that author's intention can be a subject of interpretation in certain cases but the text has far more weight than authorial intention in interpretation. Venuti generally views domestication and foreignization as two extreme poles, and never explains the binarism as a range that could simultaneously apply in relative degrees in translating any given text. Instead, he writes in absolutist terms in his treatment of the pair. Through a discussion of how Schleiermacher rejected an overtly foreignizing translation of the Greek classics, it was established that in actual practice, Schleiermacher took foreignization and domestication not as mutually exclusive extremes but that they could instead coexist in the same text. In Venuti's two genealogies on Schleiermacher, ideologically charged qualifiers and terminologies pepper the pages of his discourses such that that they effectively eclipse the real linguistic and cultural agenda of Schleiermacher. Indeed, the genealogist in Venuti sees ideology where there is none. Venuti's discourse is as ideological as his agenda is and with that as a point of departure, his treatment of Schleiermacher appears strongly tainted. His Foucaultian genealogies, teleologically speaking, are virtually a manipulation of theory.
English translation of a Taiwanese novella that tells the story of old folks who chose to stay be... more English translation of a Taiwanese novella that tells the story of old folks who chose to stay behind in the rural area while their children had left for the big city in search of greener pastures. A spoof of government policies that neglect balanced development in the urban and rural areas of Taiwan. The original author, Huang Chun-ming, is well known for his nativist themes.
English Translation of a Chinese novella. This translation also appeared in a collection of shor... more English Translation of a Chinese novella. This translation also appeared in a collection of short stories by Cheng Ching-wen, published by Columbia University Press under the title "Three-Legged Horse" and co-edited by Ch'i Pang-yuan and David Wang Der-wei.
”Lestrygonians” is one of the most challenging episodes in ”Ulysses” owing to its allusive depth ... more ”Lestrygonians” is one of the most challenging episodes in ”Ulysses” owing to its allusive depth and extraordinary wit. Descriptions of the aroma and images of food, the pungent associations they conjure up in the ”thoughtful” mind of Bloom, once juxtaposed with interior monologues showing his disturbing anxiety over Molly's infidelity, easily contribute to the difficulty of understanding the text of the episode. In this initial style, the frequent use of short psycho-narration passages reminds us of the narrator's presence through brief narrative introductions of on-going actions and scenarios in the narrative. These introductions and the need to present the inner thoughts of characters make possible the splicing of psycho-narration with monologues, and for the narrator's adoption of figural voice, both of which complicate reading and translation. In this paper, these issues on the interpretation of the episode's textual structure are studied by comparing the two Chinese translations with Joyce's original. How the initial style in ”Lestrygonians,” when combined with the food theme, interfered with reading and translation is studied from the narratological point of view using Dorrit Cohn's methodology of classifying acts of the mind.
Spectrum: Studies in Language, Literature, Translation, and Interpretation, Vol. 15(2). 17-38, 2020
The stream of consciousness mode is a key feature of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Xiao Qian and Wen... more The stream of consciousness mode is a key feature of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo have turned a blind eye on this as they followed a more socio-political strategy to drop Joyce’s psychological modes altogether from their translation. Xiao and Wen have a reason for choosing said strategy despite Xiao’s familiarity with the technique. Several factors forced them to drop the stream of consciousness mode in favor of a politically-correct format. After all, historical developments did not allow literary Modernism to thrive and Ulysses to be accepted in 20th–century China. The quarrel between the leftists and the rightists among men of literature contributed to this negative atmosphere. Then, the rise of communism made things even worse with the state’s subsequent coercion of writers and translators to toe the official line. But perhaps the single most determining factor was the Cultural Revolution and its attendant atrocities. Xiao was labeled a rightist, purged by Mao’s Red Guards, banished to a Chinese gulag, and was forbidden from writing after his release. Political persecution made him extra cautious, and their decision to jettison Joyce’s stream of consciousness mode is understandable. In Translation and Conflict, Mona Baker brings forward the concept of “selective appropriation,” which she argues to be evident in patterns of omission and addition that are traceable in the target text itself. Relevant historical events, personal accounts from Xiao and Wen, as well as more recent studies by PRC scholars show that their strategy of purging the stream of consciousness technique altogether from their translation is a classic example of selective appropriation resulting from self-censorship, of adopting a translation strategy in consideration of political reality. This paper examines Xiao and Wen’s translation strategy by comparing sample excerpts, and provides a historical account of decisive historical events.
Spectrum: Studies in Language, Literature, Translation, and Interpretation, 2018
This paper discusses the motifs of sound and music in the “Sirens” episode of James Joyc... more This paper discusses the motifs of sound and music in the “Sirens” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and how they actually interfere with reading when put side-by-side with stream of consciousness passages. In “Sirens,” Joyce puts emphasis on playful phrasings and the disruption of conventional syntactical patterns done so as to enhance prose rhythm needed for musical effect. In this episode, Bloom’s interior monologues are no longer presented in extended passages. Instead, they are integrated into the narrative and often juxtaposed with dialogue and psycho-narration. Over and above these narratological changes, the density with which rhythm, sound, music and song lyrics are included makes reading of this episode quite formidable for a reader with an ear untrained in the innuendos of sound and musical patterns embedded in literary texts, more so for a translator who has to render the story into another language. To better show how the text is read and understood, excerpts from the two translated Chinese versions by Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo, and by Jin Di are compared with Joyce’s original.
Through these comparisons, we realize that Joyce adopts playful phrasings that often disrupt conventional syntax while having a specific musical or rhythmic effect in mind, giving more emphasis on the achievement of the latter at the expense of syntactic and semantic intelligibility. The necessary consequence of such a reversal is that Joyce substantially reduced the rationality, or readability, of his extravagant prose.
This paper focuses on the autonomous monologue technique in the last episode of Ulysses, " Penelo... more This paper focuses on the autonomous monologue technique in the last episode of Ulysses, " Penelope, " and how it affects reading and translation. After getting acquainted with psycho-narration, narrated monologue and quoted monologue, as well as their various combinations in many of the preceding chapters of Ulysses, a reader faces a totally different perspective and format in this very last episode. " Penelope " is the only instance in the novel where the authorial voice is totally obliterated by the figural voice all throughout the episode. There is absolutely no sign of an omniscient storyteller's presence nor are there echoes of an overt narrative voice. Autonomous monologue is the most extreme form of stream of consciousness and the purest. In this episode, Molly tells her story by drawing from her memories of the past and her present circumstances, and her flights of fancy often touch on unexplained allusions to circumstances and details from the other Ulysses episodes. This makes reading " Penelope " all the more challenging, and when thought-representational aspects related to autonomous monologue, as well as the absence of punctuation, exacerbate the difficulty of interpreting Molly's mental excursions, the obstacles to a clear, unequivocal reading are multiplied. Reading virtually overlaps with decoding in the translation process, including the process of translation of this episode by the two teams of Chinese translators who adopted different translation strategies. The first part of this paper discusses the various expressive, textual and stylistic aspects of " Penelope " — which contribute to the difficulty of reading the text—as a prelude to the study of how the two Chinese translators interpreted " Penelope " —including the hurdles they had to overcome and the limitations of the translation strategies they adopted.
Lawrence Venuti's discourse on domesticating and foreignizing translation harks back some two hun... more Lawrence Venuti's discourse on domesticating and foreignizing translation harks back some two hundred years ago to a speech by the Prussian hermeneutician Friedrich Schleiermacher. This paper is a critique of Venuti's genealogies of Schleiermacher's original ideas on translation. Discussion focuses on several major issues. Venuti's discourse, swayed by his Post-colonialist emphasis on Foucaultian genealogies, laments Schleiermacher's choice of the educated class in pushing for the formation of a new national culture as " elitist ". Considering the condition of Prussia two centuries ago, this paper argues that Schleiemacher's proposed approach was the right course of action. Any social movement of the literary and cultural kind has to begin somewhere from the upper classes, from where the ideas spread to the general public. It is in the periphery of the semiosphere where strain leads to dynamism, and it is where the hotspot of real action is, as Yuri Lotman would assert. Venuti writes at length to expound on his dislike for the textual and psychological requirements for interpretation as proposed by Schleiermacher. For Schleiermacher, the relationship between the grammatical and the psychological is not static but rather dynamic since each one cannot lead to a complete understanding, and therefore, it is necessary to move back and forth between the two sides in an endless process of comparison and contrasting before the reader eventually arrives at a definite interpretation. While Schleiermacher's psychological mode faced criticisms from some hermeneuticians, none of his critics, including Hans-Georg Gadamer, really upheld semantic autonomy in textual exegesis in an absolutist manner. Rather, they believed that author's intention can be a subject of interpretation in certain cases but the text has far more weight than authorial intention in interpretation. Venuti generally views domestication and foreignization as two extreme poles, and never explains the binarism as a range that could simultaneously apply in relative degrees in translating any given text. Instead, he writes in absolutist terms in his treatment of the pair. Through a discussion of how Schleiermacher rejected an overtly foreignizing translation of the Greek classics, it was established that in actual practice, Schleiermacher took foreignization and domestication not as mutually exclusive extremes but that they could instead coexist in the same text. In Venuti's two genealogies on Schleiermacher, ideologically charged qualifiers and terminologies pepper the pages of his discourses such that that they effectively eclipse the real linguistic and cultural agenda of Schleiermacher. Indeed, the genealogist in Venuti sees ideology where there is none. Venuti's discourse is as ideological as his agenda is and with that as a point of departure, his treatment of Schleiermacher appears strongly tainted. His Foucaultian genealogies, teleologically speaking, are virtually a manipulation of theory.
English translation of a Taiwanese novella that tells the story of old folks who chose to stay be... more English translation of a Taiwanese novella that tells the story of old folks who chose to stay behind in the rural area while their children had left for the big city in search of greener pastures. A spoof of government policies that neglect balanced development in the urban and rural areas of Taiwan. The original author, Huang Chun-ming, is well known for his nativist themes.
English Translation of a Chinese novella. This translation also appeared in a collection of shor... more English Translation of a Chinese novella. This translation also appeared in a collection of short stories by Cheng Ching-wen, published by Columbia University Press under the title "Three-Legged Horse" and co-edited by Ch'i Pang-yuan and David Wang Der-wei.
Uploads
Papers by Carlos G . Tee
Through these comparisons, we realize that Joyce adopts playful phrasings that often disrupt conventional syntax while having a specific musical or rhythmic effect in mind, giving more emphasis on the achievement of the latter at the expense of syntactic and semantic intelligibility. The necessary consequence of such a reversal is that Joyce substantially reduced the rationality, or readability, of his extravagant prose.
Books by Carlos G . Tee
Through these comparisons, we realize that Joyce adopts playful phrasings that often disrupt conventional syntax while having a specific musical or rhythmic effect in mind, giving more emphasis on the achievement of the latter at the expense of syntactic and semantic intelligibility. The necessary consequence of such a reversal is that Joyce substantially reduced the rationality, or readability, of his extravagant prose.