Translating Homosexuality into Chinese: Case Studies of the Chinese Translations of André Aciman’s Male Gay-themed Novels

Homosexuality has been a sensitive and disputable topic in China over the last century. Novels on such a topic and their Chinese translations have been strictly censored andsilenced especially since the twentieth century onward. However, to better understand how (homo)sexual awareness and identity is established and its intersectionality with cultural discourse, history of erotics as well as politics, translation studies may be seen as a critical site to offer a brand-new perspective in queer studies. This project examines the Chinese translations of three bestseller gay novels from André Aciman by comparing and contrasting their mainland versions and their translation counterparts in both Hong Kong and Taiwan. The research juxtaposes different translational ideologies in rendering homosexuality into Chinese, along with the (re)framing narrative strategies (Baker, 2007) incorporated as a part of the translation process. The study of those strategies is not limited to the examinations of linguistic transference but of paratextual, intertextual and contextual features, such as historical background, book cover design, translators’ interviews, blurbs, film adaptations and so forth, which have been carried out in the making of the translation products. The research hopes to be able to reveal the reception of the aforementioned translated homosexual works in a non-Western context and to show the historical dynamism of receiving homosexuality and its related works in China.