Abstract
When Michael Berry took on the project of translating Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City in 2020, he did not anticipate that his translation would unleash a tsunami of online attacks. “Your family will live in hell forever and never get peace,” one attacker claimed; “Your son will die in three days,” said another (74). Unlike Berry’s previous works, in which he has maintained objective critical distance, his new book Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Campaign (2022) is much more personal, immediate, and emotional. The trauma and pain of being unwittingly swept into the centre of a massive cyber-denouncement campaign is palpable. “[J]ust as readers can create meaning from texts that the author never intended, so too the act of translation itself can carry meaning never before intended by a translator,” he laments (199).
Original language | English |
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Journal | Cha: An Asian Literary Journal |
Publication status | Published - 17 Sept 2023 |
User-Defined Keywords
- Wuhan Diary
- Fang Fang
- Michael Berry
- translation
- information authoritarianism