Translation and transcultural intertextuality : User-generated translation on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu

This article examines user-generated translation from English into Chinese on Xiaohongshu, a popular yet understudied Chinese social media platform. Using Python, the study collected 24,405 comments from the ten most popular posts which share English source texts for Chinese translation practice. The analysis shows that the English source texts consist mainly of brief philosophical or literary expressions and idioms. Some of the short and seemingly fragmented Chinese translations establish intertextual relationships with both translated and non-translated texts in Chinese and other languages, and between retranslations of the same source texts. This article proposes “transcultural intertextuality” to reconceptualize translation as a transcultural and intertextual space where pre-texts in different languages can be incorporated or transformed to suit new contexts. It also suggests that the materiality of social media platforms influences the construction of intertextual networks, sometimes blurring the boundaries between user-generated and algorithm-triggered connections.