Rewriting women in literary translation : With Reference to Literary Translation in The Chinese Mail (1904–1909)

In early twentieth-century Hong Kong, the development of print media gave rise to the wide-ranging practice of translation and circulation of Western literary stories. Examining the strategy in reframing Western literary narratives of women in Chinese as published in a series of newspapers and periodicals in Hong Kong, sheds light on the uniformity of fictional women’s remolded narratives with women’s historical realities in the sociocultural locus of Hong Kong. This study investigates how literary translations converged with prevalent stereotypes associated with women, and serves as an informative case on the inquiries into the reconstruction of foreign women in early twentieth-century Chinese-language newspapers and periodicals in Hong Kong. It shows that a strategy of rewriting, conditioned by patriarchy and moral norms in the Hong Kong social scenario, was adopted in the literary translation in the Hong Kong newspaper The Chinese Mail.