Translation

Translation is not a side activity on this site. It is one of the ways the project expands its intellectual range, bringing film theory, educational thought, and foundational literary texts into relation with a Chinese readership. The four works gathered here may look heterogeneous, but together they reveal the site’s persistent concerns: cinema, learning, media, and the texts that keep shaping how those questions get asked.

The Cinema of Attractions is Tom Gunning’s foundational essay rendered into Chinese — the argument that pre-1906 cinema was not an awkward apprenticeship for narrative film but a different relationship between film and viewer, organized around exhibition, sensation, and direct address. Méliès’s own remark, quoted in the translation, makes the priorities explicit: plot and story were “considered last,” providing only the pretext for the special effects and theatrical setpieces that were the real attraction. Gunning’s framework — the “voyeuristic” face that Metz analyzed paired with the “exhibitionist” face that early cinema foregrounded — is the historical counterweight that complicates any narrative-fiction-centric model of the medium.

In Defense of Liberal Education is the site’s translation of a defense of broad humanistic education that, as the translator’s note admits, was “highly problematic in China.” The Raphael epigraph the note reaches for — The School of Athens as an image of “the sheer joy of learning, the vibrant exchange of different ideas, and the way diverse fields of knowledge enrich one another” — registers what is at stake. The translation’s own backstory matters: a doctoral path that crossed computer science, literature, and cinema before settling in critical media studies, finding in Scott Hartley’s “fuzzy and techie” framing a vocabulary for the kind of cross-disciplinary work the translator was already doing.

Mindstorms is Papert’s foundational text on programming as a medium for thinking, translated for a Chinese audience that knew the LEGO line but not the book it was named after. The note records both pleasure and disappointment: “I personally owned three sets of Lego Mindstorms” while doing the translation; the published title arrived “completely changed to something that translates roughly to ‘Power-Ups Through Computer,’” and second-edition forewords were appended without the translator’s input. The work nonetheless does what the translator wanted it to do — make a Papertian theory of learning available in a context where BASIC ideology and rote computer-literacy curricula remain widely dominant.

Walden is the most personal of the four. The note opens with the surreal experience of seeing Thoreau quoted in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows — “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” — and felt that this canonical reference inside a Hollywood melodrama was almost like “a fishmonger using pages ripped from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation to wrap his daily catch.” The note then describes visiting Concord in 2004, finding the replica of Thoreau’s hut comically small, and Walden Pond turned into a popular swimming spot — a reminder that the texts we translate live separate lives in their original cultures, and that translation is also a meditation on what we projected onto the original in the first place.

Seen this way, translation becomes a form of curation as much as linguistic transfer. The four works are not a representative sample of contemporary Chinese reading culture; they are the books and essays the site has chosen to import, and the choices reveal what it cares about. Translation extends the project by importing lineages, not just by adding titles to a list.