Commodification of Originality in Translation: The Thorn Birds in the Chinese Literary Market

Activity: Community Talks, Presentations, Exhibitions and EventsPublic lecture/debate/seminar

Description

Commodification of Originality in Translation: The Thorn Birds in the Chinese Literary Market

The Thorn Birds, written by Collen McCullough (1937-2015) in 1977, is Australia’s highest selling book of all time, with over 33 million copies sold worldwide (Thomsen 2015). It is also the most popular Australian novel in the Chinese literary marketplace: between 2005 and 2019, 769,018 authorised copies of its Chinese translation were sold. By contrast, print runs of Chinese translation of Australian fiction are “usually around 2,000 – 4,000 copies” (Lawrence 2002: 46), while in China, a bestseller typically refers to any book selling over 50,000 copies (Xin 2005: 44). The number of counterfeit copies sold in the Chinese market, however, remains a mystery. The Chinese rights to The Thorn Birds were first obtained by a publisher in 1998, but before then, unauthorised Chinese translations of the novel have been circulating since 1983. This presentation focuses on the translation, publication and dissemination of The Thorn Birds in the context of Chinese publishing industries, in which copyright laws and piracy unusually co-exist. The resultant tension between authorised publishers and counterfeiters gives rise to a situation where “originality” is highly commodified and thus frequently reconstructed. Research on original(ity) in translation, therefore, must move beyond legal and ethical dimensions to include economic, political and historical contexts.
Period18 Aug 2022
Held atRMIT University, Australia, Victoria
Degree of RecognitionNational