Translating Hong Kong Contemporary Literature
Dr Marija TODOROVA
Hong Kong stories
Untold Hong Kong Stories:
Multimedia Narratives from the Margins
This is a project that collects and documents the voices of the marginalized in Hong Kong via a series of podcasts, comic books, and digital archives. While it may sound clichéd that the underrepresented and underprivileged ought to be heard, it is not surprising that many of these voices are still silenced owing to various reasons. Therefore, this is a project to let them get heard – literally – and to explore the understudied history and significance of the marginalized to Hong Kong. We ask: what is being forgotten? How does the marginalized shift their shapes and become adaptable? How are their stories being understood by the majority?
We would like to cover a range of multiple marginalities and intersectionalities and produce research output on an array of marginalized groups and the roles they play and (re)enact to survive in Hong Kong. The spectrum of roles, positions, and marginalities that these potential podcasters display vary in gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, occupation, age, and body. By channelling their voices, we believe that the project can benefit at least three main parties:
1) the underrepresented communities themselves;
2) HKBU: seminars, master classes, pilots of future studies, etc. and
3) the general public: local (including high school students) and global audiences within and beyond academia.
This project seeks to recognize and acknowledge the existence of those in the margins in Hong Kong.
Funding: HKBU, Faculty of Arts, Initiation Grant for Faculty Niche Research Areas (FNRA-IG) 2021/22, Co-I
comic by Kinchoi Lam
comic by @movingdrawings
Translating Hong Kong Literature: A Students' Project in Digital Publishing
As part of Chinese literature, translators and critics often overlook the literature produced in and about Hong Kong. It rarely gets the attention it deserves as part of the world's literary scene. With this project, the translation students at HKBU and I are trying to change this situation and introduce new contemporary prose and poetry from Hong Kong authors to Engish readers.
I want to dedicate this website to the memory of Professor Martha Cheung, without whom I would have never loved Hong Kong the way I do now. Prof. Cheung introduced me to Hong Kong literature with her edited book Hong Kong Collage (1998) and our discussions about identity, translation, and literature.
Hong Kong Anglophone Children's Literature
One of the important functions of children's literature is to engage young readers by allowing them to identify themselves on the pages of a book and to know that they are understood and valued. English language books for children in Hong Kong have predominantly been produced in the West. This means Hong Kong children who learn the English language are reading about literary contexts far removed from their daily lives. Recently, many books have appeared that portray the realities of everyday life for children in Hong Kong.
This has been the focus of my two years of post-doctoral research at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University under the leadership of Prof. Ahrens.
Funding: SCOLAR
Postdoctoral Fellow,
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Intersemiotic Translation: Hong Kong in Visual Translation
This project considers the intersection of intersemiotic translation and performativity through a case study of a contemporary art project of transcoding Dung Kai-Cheung's novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (2012), a book of postmodern fiction about the palimpsest nature of Hong Kong as a city of (cultural) translation. In Poposki’s artistic research, the multilingual locations in Dung’s book are performatively mapped out onto the real terrain of today's Hong Kong by means of psychogeography documented in digital photographs, which are than through a series of iterative translations transcoded into various visual formats as a transmedia art project leaving traces of the artist’s own cultural imprint on the translation product. Hong Kong Atlas is a work about positionality, a sense of place, cultural translation and transcoding, and about mediating between different cultural flows. More broadly, Hong Kong Atlas explores the emerging network of new pathways of translation between multiple formats of expression and communication that is the underlying operating mechanism of altermodernity emerging as a centerless chronotope of global negotiation and interchange between agents from different cultures.
art by Zoran Poposki
publications
Todorova looks at the largely neglected field of English language children’s literature published in Hong Kong in the last two decades. She talks about Hong Kong’s diversity, as represented in these books, recognizing the importance of representing diversity for the children of Hong Kong.
Todorova, M. 2018. "Hong Kong's Diversity in Anglophone Children's Fiction." In Jason Polley, Vinton Poon and Lian-Hee We (eds.) Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong: Angles on a Coherent Imaginary, pp. 71-86. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
This paper considers the intersection of performativity and intersemiotic translation in contemporary art through a case study of a new media art project aimed at visually transcoding Dung Kai-Cheung’s novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City.
Poposki, Z., & Todorova, M. online first. "Performativity And Intersemiotic Translation In Contemporary Art: The Case of 'Hong Kong Atlas’.” Visual Studies.