From Nan Ke Ji to DREAMING Under the Southern Bough:Tracing the Process of a Cultural Translation

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare and his Chinese counterpart Tang Xianzu, a special theatrical production named A Midsummer Night’s DREAMING Under the Southern Bough was staged in 2016 in both China and the UK. This article analyzes the process of cultural translation which the Chinese-English rendition of Nan Ke Ji had set off. The process is divisible into three stages: first, Tang Xianzu’s masterpiece Nan Ke Ji was translated into its English version A Dream under the Southern Bough; then the English version was further turned into the script for a play in English by the name of DREAMING under the Southern Bough; and this script has finally been back-translated into Chinese as a fine example of “Chinese culture going global.” It is found that in its English rendition, the original Chinese cultural elements tend to be omitted and simplified to some extent, that further intercultural adaptations are visible in the English play script based on the translation, and that in the Chinese back-translation of the play script, intercultural mediation appears to have been adopted by the translator as the dominant mode of practice.