Relay translation and South–South imaginary: the case of Muhammad Iqbal in China
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the translation and reception of the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal—a Muslim revivalist and national poet of Pakistan in China during the late 1950s era of decolonization, as part of a broader imaginary of Chinese-Pakistani solidarity in the Global South. The 1950s have seen a burst of translations of foreign literatures into Chinese, in tandem with China’s leadership position in various iterations of non-alignment during the Cold War. Most often, original literature in African and Asian languages was translated via a mediating language—in the case of South Asian languages—English. Examining the translation trajectory of Iqbal’s poems from Urdu to English to Chinese, we argue and demonstrate that the Muslim content of Iqbal’s poetry was diluted and dismissed. Closely reading the translation into Chinese of some of Iqbal’s key concepts such as “The East” (Mashriq) and “Self” (Khudi), we trace the recreation of Iqbal in English and then Chinese—from a religiously-driven poet whose anticolonialism was rooted in Sufi revivalism to a staunch anti-imperialist proponent of Pan-Asian nationalism. We aim to shine a light on the critical role relay translation plays in South-South interactions, real and imagined.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it