The creation of new academic knowledge spaces through the repatriated self-translation of foreign-language texts

This article examines the repatriated self-translation of a historical monograph, The Fifteenth Year of Wan-li, by the migrant Chinese-American historian Ray Huang from his English manuscript 1587, a Year of No Significance. Through an archival analysis of the process of self-translation and publication, it is shown that the monograph’s innovative content, style, and perspectives on history studies, as well as its re-contextualisation within the Chinese context and culture, contributed to the unprecedented popularity of the self-translated monograph in China. Through a comparative intertextual analysis of the English–Chinese parallel corpus of the monograph, we observe how the self-translator made a number of non-obligatory shifts and employed distinct strategies to return the monograph from the foreign-language text back to Chinese. This study provides evidence of the agency and latitude of academic self-translators in interpreting the original work and in adapting, revising, and rewriting the target text. It also reveals how migrant academics create new knowledge spaces through implicit translation in their foreign-language texts and (re)create new knowledge spaces through repatriated self-translation for their native academic community.