Translation in Vietnam and Vietnam in Translation: Language, Culture, and Identity (2025)

This project engages a cultural studies approach to translation. I investigate different thematic issues, each of which underscores the underpinning force of cultural translation. Chapter 1 serves as a theoretical background to the entire work, in which I review the development of translation studies in the Anglo-American world and attempt to connect it to subject theory, cultural theory, and social critical theory. The main aim is to show how translation constitutes and mediates subject (re)formation and social justice. From the view of translation as constitutive of political and cultural processes, Chapter 2 tells the history of translation in Vietnam while critiquing Homi Bhabha's notions of cultural translation, hybridity, and ambivalence. I argue that the Vietnamese, as historical colonized subjects, have always been hybrid and ambivalent in regard to their language, culture, and identity. The specific acts of translation that the Vietnamese engaged in throughout their history show that Vietnam during French rule was a site of cultural xi translation in which both the colonized and the colonizer participated in the mediation and negotiation of their identities. Chapter 3 presents a shift in focus, from cultural translation in the colonial context to the postcolonial resignifications of femininity. In a culture of perpetual translation, the Vietnamese woman is constantly resignified to suite emerging political conditions. In this chapter, I examine an array of texts from different genres-poetry, fiction, and film-to criticize Judith Bulter's notion of gender performativity. A feminist politics that aims to counter the regulatory discourse of femininity, I argue, needs to attend to the powerful mechanism of resignification, not as a basis of resistance, but as a form of suppression. The traditional binary of power as essentializing and resistance as de-essentializing does not work in the Vietnamese context. Continuing the line of gender studies, Chapter 4 enunciates a specific strategy for translating Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain into contemporary Vietnamese culture. Based on my cultural analysis of the discursive displacement of translation and homosexuality, I propose to use domesticating translation, against Lawrence Venuti's politics of foreignizing, as a way to counter the displacement and reinstate both homosexuality and translation itself. v

Reading literature of the Vietnamese diaspora in translation: A 'transdiasporic' approach

2017

This thesis introduces the "transdiasporic" approach to reading translated literature. The typical approach to understanding the relationship between the "source" and "target" contexts of a translation is to compare them directly as two distinct cultures; this is problematic in a world where cultures are constantly shifting, so a "transdiasporic" approach triangulates the "source" and "target" with a third cultural context to which they are both related in a broader network. The process and its outcomes are demonstrated via three case studies of short fiction translated between English and French and contextualised in the network of the Vietnamese diaspora.

The Passing of Literary Traditions: The Figure of the Woman from Vietnamese Nationalism to Vietnamese American Transnationalism

Amerasia Journal, 1997

Locating Trauma and Translation in Vietnamese Diasporic Literature: The Case of Linda Lê

Who Holds the Mirror? The Creation of an Ideal Vietnamese Woman

2018

This thesis analyzes the conception of two different ideal archetypes for Vietnamese women during the late colonial period, from 1918 until 1934. I use women's newspapers (primarily Phụ Nữ Tân Văn) and other contemporary literature to first trace the creation of "historical" Vietnamese heroines in the early 20 th -century. Second, I examine the creation of a cosmopolitan international woman who demonstrated Vietnamese women's encounters with the broad concept of "modernity." With these two archetypes, writers targeted women and communicated differing idealized feminine traits to emulate. With Vietnamese heroines, advocates wished to promote an invented tradition that emphasized women's duty to the potential nation of Vietnam and, further, pushed women to commemorate women such as the Trưng Sisters or Lady Triệu. Within the context of the cosmopolitan New Woman, Vietnamese writers looked to international news to find exceptional women whom Vietnamese readers should emulate. Importantly, Vietnamese women came to endorse both of these ideals through their own writing. The formation of two differing feminine models demonstrates Vietnamese women's engagement with historical time and global space to promote what they perceived as ideal feminine traits. Additionally, these two models show a growing Vietnamese engagement with global trends and international news, as well as rising nationalism within Indochina.

Nhi T. Lieu, The American Dream in Vietnamese (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, $22.50). Pp. 186. isbn 978 0 8166 6570 9.Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ...

Journal of American Studies, 2012

The gender and queer politics of translation: New approaches

Comparative Literature Studies, 2014

In recent years, we have come to understand translation as exceeding the exact reproduction of a text from one language into another and as intimately intertwined with new forms of textual and cultural production. Arguing against models of translation as pure fidelity to an original text, Walter Benjamin asserts in "The Task of the Translator" that translation is at best a contingent and provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages, given that even the most painstaking fidelity in the translation of individual words can never reproduce fully the meaning they have in the original text. 1 Far from merely transmitting subject matter or content, a translation addresses the mode of signification of the source text by touching, perhaps caressing, to add a slightly queer touch, "the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux." 2 Here Benjamin is asking us to allow the source text to touch and affect in new ways our own language, or the language into which we are translating, and to inhabit difference by and through language. This textual caress incites translation as an act of recreation, which produces in the target language an echo, not a mere copy, of the original, hinting at the utter impossibility of equivalent correspondence between the source and translated text. As Benjamin writes, the translator's task lies in "aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the [original] work in the alien one." 3 These echoes and their reverberations, and the multiple potentialities of translations and/as counter-translations as they intersect with the social, historical, and cultural conditions that produce them, remain at the heart of contemporary translation studies, of what Gayatri Spivak has referred to as the translator's task of tracing brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

“On Radicalism and Ethnographic Research on Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Vietnam.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 12(3): 32-44, 2017.

I first read Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution from cover to cover shortly after I began graduate school in the early s.  I had encountered earlier versions of some of the chapters in an undergraduate course on modern Vietnamese history that I had taken with Professor Tai, but it was not until I had the opportunity to savor the complete book while contemplating conducting my own fieldwork on gender and economic transformation that its scope and import captivated me. As an American of what had just then been termed Generation X, I came to the study of Vietnam with pressing questions forged by my earliest memories: heated political arguments between my parents; disturbing footage on the CBS Evening News that I could only quickly glimpse before my mother jumped up to change the channel (no remote control back then); the sense that the very word "Vietnam" meant something deeply significant and unsettling. I had since come to recognize these Vietnam questions as peculiarly American and had happily cast them off in favor of trying to learn about contemporary Vietnam. There, rapid market-oriented changes had rendered the late s to early s a time of both opportunity and uncertainty in which people were asking themselves questions about who they should be 32 Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. , Issue , pps. -. ISSN -X, electronic -.

Introduction: Transdiasporic Rencontres in Việt Kiều Literature

PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies

This special issue follows a conference entitled ‘Rencontres: A Gathering of Voices of the Vietnamese Diaspora’ that was held at the University of Melbourne, December 1-2 in 2016 and which sought to enable, for the first time, the titular transdiasporic rencontres or encounters between international authors of the Vietnamese diaspora. The present amalgam of previously unpublished texts written by celebrated Francophone and Anglophone authors of Vietnamese descent writing in France, New Caledonia and Australia today is the result of the intercultural exchanges that took place during that event. Literary texts by Linda Lê, Anna Moï and Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut are followed by writerly reflections on the theme of transdiasporic encounters from Hoai Huong Nguyen, Jean Vanmai and Hoa Pham. Framing and enriching these texts, scholarly contributions by established experts in the field consider the literary, cultural and linguistic transfers that characterize contemporary writing by authors of V...

Feminist Translation / Feminist Adaptation: Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility

2014

Feminist translation is not only to subvert cultures of patriarchal hegemony of translation, but also to manifest womanish language characteristics. In discussion of relationships between translation and ideology, feminist translation (or gender and translation, including the translation of queer writing) is more than an issue of assailing linguistic dominance from patriarchy, and this issue has contributed to the establishment of women’s subjectivity. Luise von Flotow’s major strategies adopted by feminist translation are supplementing, prefacing and footing, and hijacking, apparently all of which are interventionist approaches, intended for uncovering evidence that males have dominated linguistic expressions and translational norms. The foci of the feminist translation are: translating women’s body, recovering women’s lost works, asserting the translator’s identity, revising the rhetoric of translation, reading and rewriting existing translations. This paper is thus to, first, the...

TOWARDS THE PRACTICE OF FEMINIST TRANSLATION IN THAILAND

The practice of feminist translation as a specific approach to rendering a text in translation from English into Thai has been under-researched. This paper aims to introduce feminist translation practices developed by Canadian theorists and translators, and suggests the extent to which this approach can be applied to the practice of ideologically-motivated translation in Thailand. Feminist translation is an approach to a translation method that attacks, deconstructs or bypasses inherently misogynist language. Fidelity and equivalence in translation are not a matter of utmost importance to feminist translators. Rather, they tend to make their presence felt in the texts through various methods of textual intervention. This notion of intervention in translation is central to feminist translation practices which allow the translators of feminist works to draw the target readers' attention to linguistic transfer, translator visibility and feminist causes.