Ideological Agenda in Translation: A Look at Two Chinese Folktales

Abstract: The ideological agenda in translation, particularly in folklore translation, is a new concept. This essay, from a semiotic perspective, suggests that, in addition to the dimensions of linguistic competence and cultural knowledge, there is also a dimension of ideological agenda worth examining in translating folklore materials. To do so, this essay first sketches the ideas and theories in translation studies, and then points out that some folklore translations of Chinese concept of “race” and folktales helped create and/or reinforce the racist stereotypes against Chinese people and culture because of the hidden ideological agenda with colonialist and racist orientation, whether the translators/writers were conscious of it or not.

Keywords: folklore translation, translation studies, ideological agenda, decolonization, antiracism

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Introduction

A prelude to a discussion about ideological agenda in translation and folklore, or folklore translation, may be a reminder that the term Folk-Lore was an Anglo-Saxon translation (rather, a “transcreation”—translation plus creation/coinage) of the idea of “our national folklore” by William Thoms in 1846 as a “cultural nationalist” (Roper 2008, 61) at the peak of European colonization and civilization. Thereafter, folklore/folkloristics became a disciplinary study in Europe with “an international orientation before it turned to a more romantic and national agenda” with such translated foundational works as The Types of Folktale, and soon spread to other countries by the twentieth century, yet, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the “lack of scholarly interest [in translation and the transcultural adaptation of folklore texts] is surprising” (Roth 1998, 243).

Examples of this changing trend can be seen from, at least, Johann G. Herder’s (1744–1803) translations of folk songs from many other European languages to Grimms’ translation of Irish legends in the early nineteenth century and subsequent multilingual translations of the Grimms’ tales at the turn of the twentieth century around the world,
and from a wave of translating folklore around the world in the 1950s–1960s in the postcolonial era with the immigration influx (taking the US for example) to the current reality that translation of folklore materials is largely in the publication for general readers and/or children’s literature. In contrast to the previous ethnographical or philological text-producing translation of non-European folklore practices (mostly by the early missionaries), modern folkloristic studies tend to be so analytical that translation of folklore materials is often sparsely used/quoted with rare examination of translation itself. Still in contrast to such a trend in the English language world, as evident through a browse of the catalogs of major folkloristic publications and readings in folklore programs (again, in the US), efforts of translating folklore studies from European languages into non-European languages show a rising interest in seeking equal discourse and presenting local voices from the once-colonized cultures. Naturally, in this effort of decolonization and antiracism, some questions about translation beyond text should arise.

Within this broad context regarding folkloristic translation, this article focuses on the ideological agenda in folklore translation, with the belief that every folklorist is a translator as well. Through the lens of decolonization in a historical perspective, it discusses how the ideological agenda that is held by the translator (or the publisher/enabler in a broad sense) either as an insider or an outsider of the culture involved contributed to the racial stereotyping of non-Western cultures and peoples in translating folklore materials into a dominant Western language (i.e., English).

Ultimately, this paper suggests that the process and product of translation can be seen from three levels/dimensions, namely linguistic competence, cultural knowledge and experience, and ideological agenda. Limited by the space here, the first two levels/dimensions will only be briefly discussed as a background for the discussion about the concept and role of ideological agenda. The motivation is to seek concrete paths to decolonization and to equal discourse in safeguarding human diverse cultures, specifically in the context of the twenty-first century when the postcolonial power of discourse still dominates global communication and racist stereotypes are being recycled and reaffirmed.

To illustrate this argument, I choose examples of translating Chinese terms and tales into English, specifically on and related to the concept of “race” and its ramification through such popular tales as Cinderella and The Five Chinese Brothers that are still exerting great influences in both academic and public worlds. When the English term “race” was first translated into Chinese (种族zhong-zu), the chosen term (族zu) emphasized kinship-based social groups. However, when translated back into English, this term was broadened to encompass social and cultural groups. This created the misleading impression for English readers that Chinese racism existed before Western influence. This misinterpretation also led to the creation of the term “racial nationalism” in translating back the Chinese term for “nationalism” (民族主义minzu zhuyi) by adding “racial” to indicate a supposedly unique phenomenon in China. This example (Dikötter 2015, more below) highlights how translation choices can influence our understanding of different cultures and histories. It is crucial to consider the context and underlying assumptions within each language to ensure accurate communication.

While this discussion is mostly based on folkloristic perspective, the overall argument is expected to be applicable in examining translations from other cross-disciplinary perspectives.

I describe decolonization in translation as the translator’s awareness that existing translation theories and translated texts (including folktales) have been heavily influenced by the colonialist and racist paradigms that dominated world cultures for the past five centuries (more discussion below). This approach emphasizes acknowledging and highlighting the cultural meaning originally intended by the storytellers, as well as the changes introduced by transcribers and translators, especially when translating from colonized languages to colonizers’ languages.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) aptly described the essence of decolonization as “decolonizing the mind.” This involves moving away from the colonialist mindset and worldview, held by both colonizers and the colonized, that shapes how we understand ourselves and others, particularly in folklore translation. Decolonization, therefore, is an act of antiracism. It is a process of shifting our underlying ideology, mentality, and methodology towards treating all human groups and cultures with equality.

A personal experience awakened this awareness in me. In China, even by the late 1980s or early 1990s, major cities had “Friendship Stores” ( youshi shangdian 友谊商店) where only foreigners could enter. While Chinese often used the example of early twentieth century Shanghai concessions (European-controlled zones, where signs were sometimes displayed saying “Chinese and dogs are not allowed”) to arouse nationalistic passion, the existence of Friendship Stores demonstrated the reversal of this internalized colonialist mentality within China itself. This experience of my not being allowed to enter the story as a Chinese person made me realize how deeply such coloniality can be rooted in once-colonized cultures and languages. Only in recent decades has the awareness and effort of decolonization awakened many people to seek ways to move away from these paradigms in translation practice, as well as in other disciplinary reconstruction. Therefore, the purpose of this discussion is to bring an awareness of the ideological agenda that a translator may or may not be aware of, but that may be of latent impact on creating or recreating racist stereotypes through their translation or transcreation.

The proposition here is that ideological agenda in translation deserves to be treated with at least equal attention to linguistic competence and cultural knowledge in translation studies. It is derived from these premises:

1. Current cross-cultural misunderstanding and racist stereotypes against non-Western cultures and peoples are at least partly derived from the translation of folklore (or, ethnological/anthropological) materials from non-Western languages through the sixteenth to twentieth centuries.

2. In the past five centuries, the expansion of colonization and racism in ideology have polarized and hindered the development of diversity among human cultures, and created a framework of unequal discourse, based on the dualist thinking or ideology, that the civilized Western cultures are innately superior to the barbaric non-Western cultures.

3. Translation during the past five centuries has largely been used to serve the above-mentioned ideology for the spread of colonization and racism, not only for the racist colonizers, but also for those who, while being colonized, established an internalized colonized mentality of inferiority toward themselves.

4. The awareness of this history and ideology from the once-colonized groups, especially through the translators as insiders of these groups, began to voice their reckoning from the late twentieth century on (e.g., through the movement of safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage among those once-colonized cultures or countries).

In addition, this view constitutes the basis for my discussion on translation in general: most linguistic errors are due to the lack of cultural knowledge (experience); most errors shown in the lack of cultural knowledge are due to an ideological agenda (or, an attitude in making an effort to “stand in someone else’s shoe”); ideological agenda is essential in a paradigm shift against racism and colonialism and in the search of an equal, humanistic ground for cross-cultural communication (largely through translation).

In the following two sections, I first sketch some theories in translation studies in relation to folkloristics, specifically, the text-centered and context-centered approaches. Then, in the second section, I focus on elucidating the concept of ideological agenda with some specific examples. It is expected that this new topic in folklore and translation can arouse some criticism, and thus progress in maintaining the international orientation in folkloristics because every country or people is culturally or linguistically related to other countries or peoples (e.g., trade, travel, and marriage).

My methodological approach is largely based on various ideas in semiotics, but is limited to the examination of text or discourse in translation, i.e., through which significance is generated through the coding and decoding systems/processes in the translation between the two languages or cultures involved. Therefore, I see that the activity of translation is a process of coding and decoding at three levels at the same time: First, linguistically, translation conveys the text through (mostly) equivalent lexicon and convertible syntax; second, culturally, translation provides the knowledge beyond the reader’s own literal, intellectual, or physical experience; third, ideologically, translation (beginning with the choice of what to translate and how to translate) either assists cultural communication with a sense of harmony based on equal right, power, and opportunity among all human cultures, or creates, and even reinforces, stereotypes based on the constructed notion of racism or racist supremacy. This discussion focuses on the third dimension/layer, in particular, what is typically seen in the translation of the folklore texts from the cultures that were previously colonized or excluded from the “civilized.”

From Text-Centered to Context-Centered Translation Theories

Theories and Ideas in Translation Studies in General

While translation has been part of everyday cross-lingual communication in human history, the fact that translation studies developed into an academic discipline (e.g., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees) only in the late twentieth century marked the unprecedented need for and progress in global cross-cultural interaction. In echoing the eagerness for peace, social justice, and economic development around the world at the end of World War II in 1945, various international organizations such as those under the United Nations have facilitated to help meet those needs. In addition, the independence of those previously-colonized countries or regions awakened their people to re-interpret their own cultures and histories, or telling their own stories, by moving away from the ideological framework set by the colonizers. In this movement, the awareness of decolonization and antiracism, increasing need for face-to-face communication among peoples of different backgrounds, and reconstruction of academic theories and socio-political policies require massive translation work. With the development of technology in recording and printing, and now the Internet, translation work and translation studies have entered a new age. The disciplinarization of translation or translation studies has provided the platform for those whose cultures were distortedly represented by the colonizers to translate or re-translate their folklore and culture with a different ideological agenda. Furthermore, in this age translation is no longer one-way traffic as it was during the colonization period when translation was mostly done into the languages of the European colonizers. Today, two-way translation has become routine, by both the insider and outsider translators of a language.

Among the current theories in translation studies (or translatology), some focus on practical activities and some are at philosophical level. Translatology theories often employ two main approaches: one focuses on conveying equivalence–largely text-based; and the other focuses on decoding the inequivalent meaning (at semantic and syntax levels) specific either to source language or target language–largely culture-based. I look at them with my semiotic model and group them into the two domains of Linguistic Competence and Cultural Knowledge. For example, Linguistic Competence in translation emphasizes the ideas of “equivalence,” either word or sense equivalence (e.g., Marianne 2003), and filling in gaps (mostly in literature) through “descriptive” “manipulation” (Lefevere 1992). Linguistic competence is essentially a text-centered approach, as philologists have practiced, but, in reality “the ideal of total equivalence is a chimera” (Bell 1991, 6). These issues such as gender, space, and power in our post-colonial and decolonizing age may belong to the domain of Cultural Knowledge. Although the “descriptive” approach begins to deal with context, there is the issue of how linguistically close the cultures are between the two languages involved. For example, the linguistic gap due to the lack of equivalent vocabulary, different lifestyle, or use of symbols may not be easily filled through descriptive words.

The comprehensive approaches of “cultural translation” with different disciplinary orientations include different sets of questions about cultural transfer, appropriation, decolonization, as well as transcription and translation of text (Asad 1986; Bassnett 2002; Bhabha 2004; Burke 2011; Clarke 2019). Cultural translation, however, between European languages (say English and French) and that between European languages and non-European languages (say English and Vietnamese) may present very different models due to different cultural metaphors, semantics and syntax, and histories of colonizing versus being colonized. I am focusing on the former scenario. In the actual translation of a complete folklore text, literary work, or theoretical essay, there should not be the rigid application of any one or two theoretical approaches. In fact, any good translation should integrate different approaches that make it loyal to the meaning, smooth or eloquent in expression, and maintaining the cultural values and artistic flavor.

As translation studies, in a broad sense, are maturing, new ideas are also emerging (Samuelsson-Brown 2004, Weissbort and Eysteinsson 2006, Clarke 2019). One such new approach is the idea of “thick translation” (or deep translation, rich translation), proposed by Kwame Anthony Appiah to refer to the placement of target texts in rich sources languages and cultural contexts by adding auxiliary information such as explanations or annotations in the translation (1993, 817). Interestingly, this idea of thick translation was brought up in dealing with the difficulty in translating proverbs, a unique folklore form. (Folklorists may add that there are also counter-proverbs and anti-proverbs in addition to so-called regular proverbs, and they require not only linguistic competence, but also deep grasp of the cultural knowledge in both cultures to convey (translate) the changing metaphorical meanings in changing contexts.)

In reality, thick translation can be a linguistic competence issue (e.g., equivalence and descriptive approach), and can also be a cultural knowledge/experience issue. Like the idea of “thick description” (Geertz 1973) in ethnography, a good thick translation may maintain the flow of ideas and language while filling in cultural gaps without disrupting the flow of the original text/thoughts and the reader’s comprehension. While the idea of thick translation touches the problem of translatability of certain (folklore) text, Appiah acknowledges that “There is no perfect translation of a proverb, in this sense of a literary translation, because proverbs are used over and over again in different contexts for different reasons” (Appiah 1993:819).

Two examples of a comprehensive approach, or thick translation, can be seen in the English translation of the literary work, a popular science fiction, Three-Body Problem, originally in Chinese by Cixin Liu (2008; English translation by Ken Liu 2016). Like all literary work, this fiction includes many folk expressions or words, or folklore materials.

The first example is that when the original Chinese text uses wūla c ǎ o (乌拉草) to describe what is laid on bed, the English translation goes as such, “And then there was the bed, apparently lined with ura sedge from Northeast China, which the locals stuffed into their shoes to stay warm in the cold climate,” rather than providing a separate note or sentence to explain that this is a unique plant in Northeast China, a monocotyledonous plant of the genus Alpinia, mainly growing in the Changbai Mountains in Northeast China and the South of Xing’an Mountains. The second example is that when the Chinese word yáodòng (窑洞) is used to describe the housing in a village, the English translation goes, “After selecting a few possible sites, the task force stayed for a brief rest at a village where most of the inhabitants still lived in traditional cave dwellings,” using “still” and “traditional” to make the temporal connection to the readers about this regional housing style, without a lengthy explanation or description (both examples requoted from Long 2021, 18).

In these examples, there are no equivalent English words for those two Chinese terms. Yet, the translator uses a descriptive approach for the English readers to reasonably visualize/imagine those two things without personal experience, and also fill in the cultural gap in understanding a different lifestyle. Such a thick translation conveys the linguistically and culturally unfamiliar expressions, and highlights the comprehensive application of the skills and ideas mentioned above. Clearly, the popularity of this fiction beyond the Chinese world owes much to such an approach in the English translation.

Translation and Folklore Studies

Folklore studies, even before it became an academic discipline, have rested on translations along with human interactions. Besides those mentioned above in relation to the rise of folkloristics as a discipline, well-known examples of folklore translation include the Panchatantra into many languages in the past two millennia, and the Thousand and One Nights in the past one millennium. The influential Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812-1857, in seven editions) translated/edited by the Brothers Grimm and the popular series of the Colour Fairy Books (1889–1913, in 12 vols.) translated/edited by Andrew Lang at the turn of the twentieth century (more discussion on this below) are still widely used today. They doubtlessly stimulated more translations of folk and fairy tales from other countries. Certainly, the expansion of European colonization in South America, Africa, and Asia in the past five centuries stimulated folklore translation.

When Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), seen as the founder of the ideas of folkloristics, considered the two major approaches in translation, he rejected what he called a “lax” approach (i.e., one in which the language and thought of the target text are allowed to diverge rather freely from those of the source text), but advocated the “accommodating” approach (i.e., one in which they are made to conform closely to those of the source text), emphasizing that the translator must have interpretive expertise (“Theory of Translation” 2022). Clearly, the principle of loyalty to the source text (first in meaning, and then in semantics) remains true to today’s practice. At least, Franz Boas insisted the principle of “faithful rendering of the native tales” (1940, 451) at the turn of the twentieth century, with a great impact to his contemporaries.

By the mid-twentieth century, when folkloristics became a discipline with advanced degrees (as in the US), folklore translation also inspired a wave of publication on folklore of non-Western cultures. In the influential Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (Leach and Fried 1949) “translation” was an entry alone. Folklore translations were mentioned in the entries on every country, region, culture, and people, providing foundational sources for further studies.

In a specific study of “The Translation of Folk Tales” in the 1940s, folklorist Arthur Hutson differentiated that, unlike the translators of literary documents, the translator of folk tales “cannot immerse himself in the culture which is the matrix of his originals… Because the translator and his audience do not live in that society or in one like it, the illusion of moving in it cannot be fully achieved” (1949, 342). Hutson further suggested that the translator, rather than trying to archaize “the language of the translation,” “would do better to let the ancient culture speak for itself in its things, not in his words,” while using a title page or a footnote to inform the reader about the original language (1949, 344). This study may be one of the earliest folkloristic studies of translation.

When the computer was first used in the study of folk tales in the 1960s, Alan Dundes pointed out a crucial problem, not about the use of the computer, but about the translation. In building a database with folk tales translated into English from different languages, “What one has sought and found then is the themes of Western culture in foreign folk tales translated into English, a Western language. Can one reasonably assume that this is an accurate scientific comparison of native themes in native folk tales?” (Dundes 1965, 186). This question remains essential in folkloristics in general since translation or quotation from translation is a common practice in ethnographical and theoretical writings. It is also a question to be further addressed in the discussion on ideological agenda below.

A fact in the 1960s not to be neglected is that a great number of translations of folklore texts from around the world were published in the English world, for example, a series of “Folktales of the World” edited by the great folklorist Richard Dorson (1916–1981) with his foreword for each volume.¹ The 1960s were the decade when folkloristics had just taken root as an academic discipline and needed basic folklore texts to diversify the field while exerting its influence on the public. As a result, a number of ethnographical case studies were produced by the new generation of folklorists from Indiana University and the University of Pennsylvania, two newly established folklore programs. Indeed, similar efforts yielded numerous translations thereafter within and beyond folkloristics.

In the 1970s, Russian folklorist Viktor Gatsak tackled the “Problems of folklore translation of the epic” (1977). In attempting “to combine the scientific nature of translation with the rhythmic organization of speech” in translating epics into Russian from Adyghe (Circassian) folklore, Gatsak is regarded as the first to introduce the term “folklore translation.” A similar approach is also seen as “a retelling of an epic text” (also, folk songs and tales) in contrast to “scientific and literary translation of it” (requoted from Svetlana 2022, 611). As sketched above, many theories in translation studies were developed during those decades, while folklore translation was also being discussed.

Presenting one of the new perspectives in the early 1970s in American folklore studies, Dennis Tedlock, through the examples of transcribing and translating Zuñi narratives into English (which can be related to other similar work of translating from oral narrative/storytelling to written form, commonly practiced even today), examined the issue of translating the “style in oral narrative.” He pointed out that when there was no value found in the original narrative through translation, it was simply because the translation was “a distortion of the originals” (1971, 132). This argument is also related to the concept of “texture,” along with text and context, that Dundes (1964) discussed, in that tones, volume, and gestures in telling a story are not only critical to understanding the text, but also reflect essential cultural values.

By the 1990s, more studies directly or indirectly addressed the role and impact of translation in folklore studies. For example, Richard Bauman addressed the issue of nationalization and internationalization of folklore by focusing on the works of Henry R. Schoolcraft (1793-1864) (Bauman 1993:247), whose English translations formed a main source of the Native American folklore material. Although Stith Thompson criticized that, “Unfortunately, the scientific value of his work is marred by the manner in which he has reshaped the stories to fit his own literary taste” (Thompson 1966, xv). Translation of Native American Literature was also discussed (Hymes 1992). Regarding the “literary approach” in folklore studies, Lauri Harvilahti highlighted the representative example that “Folklorist Aleksei Ulanov made a word-for-word translation, stating that, in the process, the traditional content, style, and poetic devices had been observed, and only side episodes hampering the integrity of the plot were removed” (Harvilahti 1997, 510). On the concept of “magic” in folklore studies, Kathleen M. O’Connor pointed out an emerging situation that folklorists, along with anthropologists and historians, began to question “whether the term is itself a proper or useful ‘translation’ in the ethnographic and larger cultural sense of the diversity of historical and contemporary beliefs and practices within discontinuous linguistic, religious, ethnic, and regional communities” when dealing with the “translation of magical cultures” (O’Connor 1997, 519).

Furthermore, German folklorist Klaus Roth explored the issue of “Cross Boundaries: The Translation and Cultural Adaptation of Folk Narratives” (1998). In his study, along with the above-mentioned and some other studies on specific genres, Roth summarized many ideas and techniques and made useful suggestions for folklore translation in general. For example, in order “to gain a deeper understanding of how folklore texts are communicated across linguistic and cultural boundaries,” such basic questions must be considered: How does the translation of folklore texts function? Does it differ from literary translation? Who were the translators? What about bilingual audiences, bilingual narratives, and code switching? How, on what occasions, and for what audiences was and is a translation undertaken? What methods of translation are applied and what changes are made? What levels and elements of the text are adapted to the recipient culture? What is translatable and what is not? (1998, 243–44). Roth further points out that “From the perspective of folklore theory, the translator merely creates yet another variant of a tale or song which is then gradually assimilated to the style and world view of the recipient culture” (1998, 245). This theory is true in the sense that, for example, many tales from non-Western cultures have been absorbed into Western cultures, and vice versa. The theory also carries the question: to what extent, cultural and racial stereotypes are created through such translations, especially when the translator purposely translates the “untranslatable” (for the sake of lack of equivalent lexicon or different cultural values and lifestyle) or emphasizes “readability” by alternating certain names or metaphors/symbols or idioms that are familiar to the reader of the translation, but are against the cultural logic in the original text? This question will be further discussed below with examples.

Entering the twenty-first century, folklorist Lee Haring sees that “Folklore studies and translation studies … have been growing and maturing in parallel” (2011b, 16). He also argues that, with his experiences as a translator of folktales from five island groups in the Southwest Indian Ocean for four decades, “if folklore exists as a means of boundary maintenance and continuity, studies of other people’s folklores arises from a sense of difference, and attempt to cope with it. Hence all folklore studies are translations” (2011a, 32). Indeed, folkloristics is based on and about translation, while the field of translation studies is about linguistic and cultural differences. Thus, folkloristics and translation are the two sides of a coin. Haring further holds that folklore and translation are part of “cultural creolization” and that “The creolization process itself is a variety of translation” which has become a subject of study for folklorists, while challenging folklorists not to “shrink from theorizing” as translation theory has now arrived (2011a, 34).

In a case study of a historical comparison of the popular translation (in the methods of free and literal translation) and the (scientific) accurate, but artistically incomplete translation of Circassian folk songs and legends into Russian, the two representative approaches (or principles) in translating folk narratives become self-evident (Svetlana 2022, 615). However, these approaches can be more problematic when the two languages are from two cultures with drastically different religions, cultural values, and lifestyles, as discussed below.

As digital folkloristics develops along with digital humanities, the complexity of translation continues at a different level from what Dundes discussed in 1965, as mentioned above. Referring to the rise of “computational folkloristics’’ (Abello, Broadwell, and Tangherlini 2012), folklorist Timothy Tangherlini holds that “a revolution has occurred in the materials available for the study of folklore” (Tangherlini 2016, 5). The rapid advances in computing and Internet technology have greatly changed the ways of interpersonal communication as well as cross-cultural exchange through translation, various social media and hypermedia, data visualization, text mining, and digital mapping require folklorists to rethink not only the “text” and “context” in the age of “digital folklore” (Blank 2009, 2012; Buccitelli 2017; Tolbert and Johnson 2019; de Seta 2019), and “posthuman folklore” (Thompson 2019), but also the ideological agenda behind such communicative discourse.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a revolutionary turn in translation with the emergence of machine translation (MT) and artificial intelligence (AI). However, the fundamental issues in translation remain largely unchanged. This deserves separate discussion, but two points can be made here:

1. MT and AI as Productivity Enhancers, Not Replacements: Similar to machines in agriculture and industry, MT and AI do not fundamentally alter human-technology relationships. They increase productivity but do not replace human translators or change the core relationship between humans and language. Cultural values and ideologies persist. The alienation observed after the Industrial Revolution was an ethical concern, not a replacement of human capabilities. When machines save human labor, humans innovate and contribute in other areas. While MT/AI may change the nature of translation work, the question of its impact on humanities (human relations, values) is distinct. This has been explored in studies of posthuman folklore (Thompson 2019).

2. AI as a Reflection of Human Input: While AI in human-human and human-nonhuman relations might appear “superhuman” with its potential to replace human skills and alter ideologies, it is crucial to remember that AI is a learner, integrator, and imitator. AI-powered translations reflect the data it is trained on, which is ultimately provided by humans. Even web-based MT used in tourism falls under this principle. The ideological agenda in MT translations stems from the user’s input. If MT/AI learns and surpasses humans (beyond programmed tasks), it will learn from its users, who are primarily cultural groups. This means the systems will learn and express the ideologies and values of their users, even at the semantic level. AI in translation, unlike AI in games like chess, is fundamentally tied to human languages and cultures.

Therefore, the question should not be whether MT/AI replaces humans, but rather who the primary users are and how their cultural values shape the technology and result of MT/AI translation. Ultimately, no matter how the means of communication have changed, the essential content of folklore (e.g., in oral and verbal, material, or behavioral forms) remains the basis of everyday life, and thus the center of folklore studies. As can be drawn from the above views, folklore studies are inseparable from folklore transition, which needs not only an inter-linguistic, philological, or text-centered approach, but also an inter-cultural, context-centered investigation. In addition, it now calls for a reflection upon the ideological agenda latent in translation, revealing the struggle of power in discourse, especially in the age of decolonization. What seems concerning in folkloristics, unfortunately, is that the lack of interest in the study of folklore translation continues, or the gap with other disciplinary studies in relation to translation is widening, especial as we enter the era of “translation plus” (Beattie, Bertacco, and Soldat-Jaffe 2016, 1), where translation itself is declining, but it is increasingly becoming part of any disciplinary studies such as, translation + history, translation + religion, and, of course, translation + folkloristics.

Ideological Agenda and Racist Stereotyping through Translation

The folklore text is always coded through various symbols in artistic communication in a culture or language in response to realities and to make sense of everyday life by the users at personal, group, and national levels. In a temporal/diachronic sense, even within one culture, the folklore text has to be translated/interpreted in different social contexts for its transmission and transformation. In a spatial/synchronic sense, when a folklore text is translated into a different language and read by readers who have different cultural coding systems, the challenge for the translator is not only about linguistic competence and cultural knowledge, but also about the ideological agenda, regardless of whether or not the translator is conscious of his/her stand.

In discussing the role of the translator from a different view of “intercultural awareness,” Douglas Robinson gives two scenarios: One is that translation is among the everything created by God, and thus “Anyone who deviated from the form and appearance of translation did not deserve the name of “translator”; the other is that “translators and interpreters were trained and hired by people with money and power,” and even today, “professional translators must in most cases conform to the expectations of the people who pay them to translate” and “the whats and the hows and the whys of translation are by and large controlled by the publishers, clients, and agencies” (2003, 199). These are also questions that the translator must answer before acting.

In folkloristics, folklore translation has reflected and reinforced the theory of survivals articulated by Edward B. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (1871), in that the dichotomy was set for the later studies. The “primitive/savage” versus the “civilized” could be seen in the correlations of “folklore” versus “myth,” “magic” versus “religion,” “children/women” versus “adult,” as seen today in the presentation and representation through folklore translation, that is, the folklore/culture from the non-Western cultures versus that of the Western cultures. This dichotomy is obvious in the still-influential example of the series of Colour Fairy Books, translated/edited by Andrew Lang (1844–1912). Scrutinizing Lang’s Introduction in The Blue Fairy Book (1889, 351), Anna Smol holds that Lang “pursues a course of study that invokes [such] racial theories” prevalent at that time and “sees himself as one of these [those] ‘learned men’ placed high on an evolutionary scale” (Smol 1996, 178). Through his translation, editing, and transcreation/rewriting, Lang enforced the dichotomy in which “folk tales and their ‘childlike’ and ‘primitive’ qualities still contribute to our notions of what children ‘naturally’ will like to read,” but, as Smol warns after scrutinizing Lang’s works, “It would seem, then, that Lang’s basic paradigm of the ‘savage’ and the ‘civilized,’ which certainly determined his own editorial and translation practices, still shapes some current ways of thinking about the child and children’s literature” (1996, 181), as we see the increasing interest and number of publications on fairy tales in recent decades. I consider Smol’s warning to be a reckoning of the ideological agenda in translation that has been dominated in the hidden power of the Western languages and through Western colonization in the past centuries, as seen today in numerous folklore translation (e.g., of concepts and tales) in English from other languages in Africa and South America, where such a racial stereotype is constantly reaffirmed even by means like bedtime stories for children.

In current limited studies of folklore translation, more discussions have focused on the issue of translation itself. For example, how the content of one folklore item is part of the whole folkloric system in a culture, and how the activity of translation is related to ethical and political issues at various levels, as seen in Haring’s (2011a, 2011b) discussion on the situation in Africa. For this reason, I will discuss the dimension/domain of ideological agenda in folklore translation through a semiotic perspective, particularly the role of the translator in the process of implementing such an ideological agenda consciously or not.

One example of how translation of key terms–between English and Chinese–can be manipulated to filter in a specific ideological agenda is the case of how “race” was translated into Chinese, and how the translated Chinese term(s) was back-translated into English² At the turn of the twentieth century, the term “race” was generally translated into Chinese as Zhong-zu (种族) or ren-zhong (人种), and was later to also mean the Chinese as a “nation” (min-zu民族) of the same race. Thereafter, the term zhong and zu–two commonly used characters/terms in classic Chinese for tribal/familial lineage/clan–began to mean either all Chinese as one minzu , or each cultural/ethnic group as minority minzu. However, by the turn of the twenty-first century, historian Frank Dikötter, in a book on the discourse of race in modern China, states that “I translate by ‘race’ (zu, zhong, zulei, minzu, zhongzu, renzhong, in Chinese) terms that appear to stress the biological rather than the sociocultural aspects of different people” (Dikötter 1992, viii). Immediately, one may ask: Were/are those Chinese terms equivalent to “race” in English? Ironically, this book was immediately heralded as a “classic” that “changed the way historians view China,”³ “showing for the first time on the basis of detailed evidence how and why racial categorization became so widespread in China.”⁴ Some applauded it as “extremely well researched with an objectivity” (Meserve 1993, 78), “short, powerful, luminous book” with “relentless logic” based on “a formidable breadth of scholarship” (Benton 1992, 594).

Yet, some clear-minded China historians also point out “two principal limitations … the first relating to the sources examined, and the second to the modes of analysis used” (Lloyd 1993, 475). “While the author constantly remains readers that the discourse under examination and indeed the notion of raceitself is a social construction, he fails to point out how his own analysis of numerous statements is also a reconstruction open to alternative interpretation,” and “he collapses the distinction between national or ethnic consciousness and racial consciousness or racism” (original reviewer’s emphasis) (Howard 1995, 431–32).

To the point about translating the key terms of race and racial nationalism , anthropologist Charles Stafford points out,

To translate these as ‘race’ is to impose Western cultural constructs. ... When Dikötter says he is studying ‘discourse about physically discontinuous peoples’ (reviewer’s emphasis), we must again ask whose concept of ‘racism is being taken into account? ... The result is that a number of discourses which are arguably not about race become subsumed under the general heading of ‘racial discourse’. ... to translate minzuzhuyi (‘nationalism’) as ‘racial nationalism’ is to emphasize one aspect of the term, and to perhaps understate what was most important about the discourse: its ambiguity. ... But the analysis would have been considerably strengthened by an attempt to understand the Chinese concepts on their own terms. (Stafford 1993, 609)⁵

Thus, we see that even in the contemporary academic world, there is a strong tendency of implement certain ideological agenda in translations, or promoting certain ideological agenda in the name or form of translation. Let us look at two concrete examples in folk and fairy tale translation.

Example 1

In the collection of Folktales of China(1965),⁶ translated and edited by Wolfram Eberhard with a foreword by Richard Dorson, which has undergone several reprints, there is one tale with the title “Cinderella” (Tale 66, 1965, 155–60). It is a translation of the Chinese tale with the title “Bamei yu Liangmei” (疤妹与靓妹, “Pock-faced Sister and Beautiful Sister”) from a collection published in China in 1931, edited by Lin Lan.⁷

The question here is, while the original title is simple and clear, why is it translated into Cinderella? In fact, the translated content of the tale was quite directly from the Chinese, in that the younger sister “had a face covered with pock marks, so that everyone called her Pock Face [Bamei]” (Eberhard 1965, 155), and “Pock Face” was used throughout the tale, in contrast to “Beauty [Liangmei]” (beautiful sister/girl).

Two contextual facts may help understand this question. The Chinese Cinderella tale was first introduced by R. D. Jameson (1932), from which the tale Ye Xian was known to be the earliest (i.e., the ninth century) written record of the tale type AT 510A (Cinderella).⁸ Later, Arthur Waley (1947) provided another word-to-word translation. The other fact is that Stith Thompson used Waley’s translation as the main Chinese source for 510A in his second edition of The Types of the Folktale (1961, 177). Further, Ye Xian is not a mixture of several tale types (Li 1994; Zhang 2021), but the tale “Bamei yu Liangmei” is mixed with such tale types as AT 400 (The man on a quest for his lost wife), AT 465 (The man persecuted because of his beautiful wife), and AT 503 (The gifts of the little people). Therefore, from the view of the tale type, “Bamei yu Liangmei” should not be considered as a typical AT 510A, bearing the title of Cinderella. Looking at the functions and figures (as shown in Propp’s ([1928] 1968) morphology), “Bamei yu Liangmei” presents a confused role of the protagonist who also shows the characteristics of the antagonist or the villain. Here is how the tale ends:

The two sisters had a series of competitions to prove who was the real “Beauty” who could continue a good marriage, and after Pock Face lost two tests, “she insisted on another test – that of jumping into a cauldron of hot oil. She hoped that Beauty, who would jump first, would be burned. Beauty, however, was quite unharmed by the boiling oil, but the wicked sister jumped into it and did not come up again. Beauty put the roasted bones of the wicked sister into a box and sent them over to her stepmother by a stuttering old servant women, who was told to say, ‘Your daughter’s flesh.’ But the stepmother loved carp and understood ‘carp flesh’ instead of ‘your daughter’s flesh.’ She thought her daughter had sent her over some carp, and opened the box in a state of great excitement; but when she saw the charred bones of her daughter laying inside, she let out a piercing scream and fell down dead. (Eberhard 1965, 159–60)

Contrasting to the popular image of Cinderella, Beauty is associated with Cinderella through the manipulated title of the tale. She becomes a Chinese Cinderella who is an evil and vengeful woman in the Western gaze. So, how would this image of Chinese Cinderella contribute to the imagination or stereotyping of Chinese people and culture? Especially considering that this translation was republished and reprinted many times for many decades at the same time images like “Dr. Fu Manchu” and its clones filled the public’s imagination through media. How, for young readers, would such an image of Chinese Cinderella be related to other images of the Chinese sisters and brothers, like picture books like The Five Chinese Brothers have shaped children’s fantasy and memory of the Chinese for several generations? In the Skopos theoretical approach, what is the “purpose” of this “cultural translation”?

Example 2

The picture book The Five Chinese Brothers (1938) was written by Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by Kurt Wiese. This book has been widely read by children of several generations with dozens of reprints, and was put on the list of “Teachers’ Top 100 Children Book” by the National Education Association in 2007.⁹ It was also named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list in 1959.¹⁰

The popularity of this picture book, in my opinion, lies its use of plot/structure of the classic tale in many cultures known as AT 513 (The extraordinary companions) and AT 571 (All stick together), better-known through “How Six Men Got on in the World” and “The Six Servants” in Brothers Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Certainly, the illustration played a key role as well. In fact, The Five Chinese Brothers is not a translation, but a transcreation or rewriting based on a previous English translation of the Chinese tale, “The Five Queer Brothers”¹¹ by Adele Fielde (1839–1916),¹² although Bishop did not tell the source of her tale.

In 1893, Fielde, with her two-decade experience in China as a missionary, published the collection, Chinese Nights’ Entertainment: Forty Stories Told by Almond-eyed Folk Actors in the Romance of The Strayed Arrow , purposely arranged the tales to be told in the style of Arabic Nights (or Thousand and One Nights). The social appeal quickly led her to revise it into a second edition in 1912, retitled as Chinese Fairy Tales: Forty Stories Told by Almond-eyed Folk , with illustrations by Chinese artists.¹³

If comparing with many other Chinese versions, Fielde’s translation can be considered loyal, although her version does not have the beginning element of absentation, namely, parents praying for having a son/child, which is often highlighted in Chinese versions, including those collected in the 1990s in the same region where Fielde stayed a hundred years earlier (i.e., Chaoshan, Guangdong Province bordering Fujian Province) (Ji 1998, 600–3; Lin 2016). Here is the synopsis of Fielde’s 1893 translation:

Five brothers, identical in appearance, possessed extraordinary secrets. The eldest could swallow the sea, the second’s neck defied blades, the third boasted endless legs, the fourth was fireproof, and the fifth breathed no air. The eldest, daily catching fish by swallowing the entire ocean, was pressured to share his secret. When he took neighbor boys fishing, their disobedience led to their drowning upon his release of the water. Blamed for murder, he faced execution. Each brother, visiting their mother before their “death,” revealed their family’s hidden talents. The second, immune to blades, replaced the eldest. The third, with endless legs, survived being thrown in the sea. The fourth, fireproof, endured boiling oil. Finally, the parents and judge planned to smother the “brother” in a giant cream cake baked in a massive oven. Unbeknownst to them, this was perfect for the fifth brother, who thrived without air. He emerged safely after the night and rejoined his remarkable brothers, living happily ever after, each a master of their unique gift.

Regarding this tale, folklorists in China have identified the earliest written record, a tale with the title of The Seven Brothers (Qi Xiongdi) in the collection of Miscellaneous Records by Han Zi(Han Zi Za Zu 憨子杂俎) by Tu Benjun (屠本畯 1542–1622), and have a consensus: “This tale and its variants show that, first, the relations of oppressing class and oppressed class; second, common people’s awareness of and confidence in defeating the rulers” (Tian 1981, 192). They have interpreted this tale as a proof of a legacy for ages, “solidarity is strength” (tuanjie jiushi liliang), “a classic example of interpreting a deep philosophy through oral narrative” (Liu 2002, 468). Folklorist Liu Shouhua points out that in this tale, “the heroes resist the emperors and officials, and thus symbolically express the courage of the common people in fighting against the oppressing ruling class, as seen in numerous variants. It is a rare masterpiece in Chinese folktale repertoire” (Liu 2017, 389–90).

However, some twists in Bishop’s version are beyond common practice in translation and/or artistic adaptation. In Fielde’s version, the tale is under the title of “The Five Queer Brothers,” but it is changed to “The Five Chinese Brothers.” This act also violates the nature of the fairy tale that it is to lead the reader to “once upon a time,” and to a world of imagination. Further, equating “queer/weird” to “Chinese” certainly sends a negative impression to the young readers. Also, in Fielde’s version, the narration goes, “the eldest brother … the second brother …,” but in Bishop’s version, the pronouns are “The First Chinese Brother … The Second Chinese Brother …,” adding and highlighting “Chinese.” Repeatedly emphasizing “Chinese” is nothing but reinforcing the racist stereotypical identity marker against the Chinese even today.

Further, in Fielde’s version, there is no “judge” speaking or appearing after the fifth brother comes out of the oven and goes home, but in Bishop’s version, this line is added: “Finally, the judge said, ‘we have tried to get rid of you in every possible way and somehow it cannot be done. It must be that you are innocent.’ So they let him go home.” Clearly, the role of the judge in Bishop’s version praises the Western legal system–“presumption of innocence” (innocent until proven guilty), which is a tool that can be manipulated by the ruling or rich class in the disguise of law and justice. Even in the West, this system has a short history. Such a manipulation in the name of translation or adaptation, even literary creation, effectively distorts a culture and reinforces an existing stereotype.

Finally, in Fielde’s version, the ending is “Then he [the fifth brother] safely crawled forth, and returned to his home, where he dwelt happily for many years with his remarkable brothers,” but in Bishop’s version, the ending line is “And the five brothers and their mother all lived together happily for many years.” This twist shows that it is the stretch to fit a typical Western fairy tale pattern, in which the protagonists have their “wedding” and live “happily ever after,” as most widely seen in Brother Grimm’s tales (or, rather, after Disney’s twists). This twist is obviously to meet the expectations of Western readers. It is also an implication of the Oedipus Complex that has been an essential part of Western literature, arts, and religion. Bishop’s ending is an imposition of her imagined stereotype of Chinese social/familial relations with her own ideological agenda. It is simply against the cultural logic in Chinese familial life about the mother-son relationship (as mentioned below). It cannot be simply interpreted or measured with the Western concepts of Oedipus Complex.

As a founder of psychological anthropology, Francis L. K. Hsu (1909-1999) has examined and demonstrated that in the familial relationship in Chinese culture, the father-son-centered family relationship emphasizes continuity, inclusiveness, authority, and asexual expression (Hsu [1953] 1981; [1961] 1972). This relationship also mirrors one of the dominant virtues in Chinese/Confucian ethics, namely, the filial piety of the sons to parents as the loyalty of ministers to the emperor in maintaining familial and societal orders. By the same cultural logic, the mother-son-centered family relationship lies in the continuity of family lineage, that is, the mother giving birth to a son in order to have the son have his own son as soon as possible in order to continue the lineage. Family clan/lineage is essential to Chinese culture and society. This cultural tradition is proved by the fact that, besides the typical ending of this tale, Chinese parents always hope their children get married and have their own children so that the family lineage continues.¹⁴

Certainly, the illustrations may be an even greater factor for the popularity of the book, and thus for the spread of the racist stereotypes (e.g., men’s queue, slanted eye, and face color) against Chinese. The illustrator Kurt Wiese (1887–1974) had a long list of books with his illustrations, including several books of Chinese tales. Certainly, given the socio-political context in the US in the early twentieth century, such an act of adding fuel to the fire could make a big boost of sale with a book like The Five Chinese Brothers. However, if Wiese had no direct or intimate experience with Chinese culture and people, that would be a different story. It is in this sense, we must repeat our question: What was his ideological agenda in illustrating the book as such, most strikingly the queues (in addition to the sameness of color, dress, or facial expressions, or stupidity), while he had personal living experience in China during the years crucial to the history of Chinese men’s queues?

Chinese people experienced a hairstyle revolution when the Republic of China was founded in 1912, ending the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). The common slogan at that time was, “To keep hair (queue), or to keep head.” One could be killed for keeping the queue, a symbol of resistance to the new Republic. This social change resembled the hairstyle change at the beginning of the Qing Dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century, when not wearing one’s hair in a queue was punished by death. Certainly, hairstyle and dress style for women were also changing along with various nationalist movements for a new, modern China which included the rise of folkloristics. It was during those years that Weise arrived in China in 1909, witnessed the 1911 Revolution, and stayed in China for the next six years. Born in Germany, Wiese wanted to be an artist, even though he was sent to China to do business. But his experienes in China clearly influenced his illustrations for many books, as “he enjoyed working primarily in Chinese brushes and lithography.”¹⁵ This style of painting certainly played a key role in the 1959 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for The Five Chinese Brothers. Nevertheless, his experience in China, for whatever reason, made him decide to highlight the queue in the book.

As a matter of fact, the custom of Chinese men wearing a queue with front head-hair shaved was only practiced between the late seventeenth century until 1911, when the Manchus ruled China. This was not a custom practiced in China in the millennia before that period, nor afterward. Therefore, the use of this stereotypical image of the Chinese men violates the basic nature of the fairy tale that creates an imagined world with the spatial and temporal dimensions marked by “Once Upon a Time …”

The two examples, along with the case of translating the Chinese term minzuzhuyi (nationalism) back into English “racial nationalism,” also reflect that they are in line with the greater historical context of colonization in the past five centuries and racism in everyday life, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, in China: In Legend and Story, published by missionary Campbell Brown in 1907, the first tale in it was entitled “Jephthah’s Daughter.” The author arranged the volume with the first half as “Heathen Life: The Material” and the second half as “Christian Life: The Results,” which were “concerned with people personally known to the writer, and are sketches from life.”¹⁶ The author stated that “The object of this book is to show how Chinese people live and think, first when they are heathens, and afterwards when they are Christians.”¹⁷ Clearly, changing or imposing the title of a tale so as to enforce an ideological or religious agenda has been a long tradition in European translations of Chinese folklore (or other colonized cultures or languages). In the same logic, the discriminative federal laws against the Chinese in the US (e.g., Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882 and changed in 1965) reinforced and enabled those wide-spread racist stereotypical images such as Fu Manchu in the series of films by the Hollywood, and even children’s picture book The Five Chinese Brothers . Clearly, similar stereotypical images and speeches against the Chinese and Chinese Americans have resurged in the public domain even by the topic leaders of the country (e.g., China Virus, Kung Flu).

This argument is further supported by the example of how the Oceti Sakowin literary tradition was colonized by missionaries and settlers, and how insider women, the traditional cultural keepers, have undertaken decolonization efforts. Sarah Hernandez offers a compelling analysis. She contrasts the translation approaches of Ella Deloria (1889–1971), a Dakota insider, and the missionaries. Hernandez points out, “Missionary translators internally colonized the Dakota literary tradition by supplanting Dakota language and literature with Western beliefs and values that disrupted and significantly undermined the Dakota nation’s connection to their ancestral homelands and each other. …”(Hernandez 2023, 31–32). In contrast, Deloria championed “literary translation”—“one with the most prestigious forms of translation and the one with the highest cultural significance” (Hernandez 2023, 95). However, Deloria’s voice was largely ignored in later publications.

This difference between the insider’s preference of “literary translation” and the missionaries’ “supplanting” Dakota beliefs and values goes beyond methodology; it is ideological. While Franz Boas, Deloria’s mentor, shared the missionaries’ motives—“who deliberately ‘manipulated’ Dakota languages and literature, converting them into settler-colonial land narratives” (Hernandez 2023, 91), Deloria, possessed an insider’s understanding of her people and traditions, being both a woman and a scholar with a degree from Columbia College (later University). Through this case study, Hernandez argues that “Decolonization is a continuous and ongoing process that look different for each family, community, nation – and generation” (Hernandez 2023, 88). The decolonization process may indeed require as much time as the colonization itself.

Conclusion

Studies of ethnicity, identity, and antiracism in folkloristic and anthropological studies have shown that our current terms and concepts have “a deep connection to Western colonialism” (Heldke 2003, xv), and the efforts of decolonization have helped us gain an ideological awareness (Sökefeld 2001; Briggs and Naithani 2012; Zhang 2020b). Looking at folklore translation, this study proposes a semiotic approach to examine folklore translation from three dimensions: linguistic competence, cultural knowledge, and ideological agenda, with emphasis on the third dimension. The central point is that folklore (e.g., folk and fairy tales) transmits its vitality through expressing the folk’s resistance to any injustice and oppression, and hope of living a better life, as an “art of subversion” (Zipes 2006), and grows in its own culture and social soil with distinctive cultural logic. Translating a folk narrative with a colonialist ideological agenda is dangerous. It can exert long-lasting impact, especially to children. We know for sure that the cultural logic in the folklore will eventually survive any manipulation in translation that serves colonization and racism. We are curtain that more and more readers will gain an awareness of this history and reality, and are pursuing their hope to live harmoniously together. As drawn from translating African folklore, “Translation is, no doubt, the most telling instrument to awaken the hegemonic consciousness” (Haring 2011b, 10). This kind of awakening, or reckoning of the ideological agenda in translation and transcreation, is now happening globally in the context of decolonization and antiracism.

Translation, with a certain skopos/purpose, creates a “third space” (in Bhabha’s sense) in the discourse of identity in the post-colonial (Bhabha 2004, 55), in addition to the broad discussion in the cross-cultural context (Dingwaney and Maier 1995). Translation also is a integrating tool that helps create a new, “third culture” through folkloric interaction, as part of the mechanism of human cultural development (Zhang 2015) and “cultural creolization” in global context (Haring 2011b, 7), in which “folkloric identity” (shared lifestyle and values), but not “race” (based on blood or skin color) forms the basis of diverse cultural/folk groups (Zhang 2020b).

Believing that the “Two disciplines, folklore and translation studies, can now make common cause in the translating of folkloric systems” (Haring 2011b:7), and that translation is a process to achieve a transparency of the “manifold conditions under which a translation is produced and consumed” through the action of the translator (Venuti 1992, 4, 2021), I want to end this discussion by quoting a personal revelation of a folklorist. In handing the publication of some translations from Chinese to English, particularly with some terms and concepts that do not have equivalences in the existing Western discourse, folklorist Anthony Buccitelli, as the editor of a folklore journal, reflects in his compelling remarks that it “has been both a challenging and rewarding experience … It is perhaps the nature of rigorous training in any discipline that we come to regard certain ideas or approaches as heterodox or even erroneous when they challenge what seem like long settled matters in the construction of the contemporary field. I dwell on this point because I came to understand … that I was reading these essays too much through my own lens as a western scholar, and not making enough room for the unique intellectual trajectory of a different disciplinary construction” (Buccitelli 2022, 109–10). No doubt, this is a reflexive call to all translators, with an ideological awareness in dealing with not only folklore translation, but also translation in general.