Translating and Imaging China: Anthologies of Modern Chinese Drama in English Translation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is an investigation of English-language anthologies of modern Chinese drama that emerged during the later twentieth century. Since 1970, approximately ten such anthologies have been published in the anglophone world. These anthologies played a critical role in constructing modern Chinese drama as a literary genre and in projecting the image of China as a successful socialist nation. By analysing these ten anthologies in terms of the criteria that influenced the selection of plays, this article aims to shed light on how such translation anthologies contributed to the (re)construction of the image of modern Chinese drama in the English-speaking world. This process of play selection is shaped by two primary factors: the first is the predominant national ideology in the source culture, which affects the thematics of the translation anthologies; the second is the individual aesthetics of the anthologists, which significantly influence their selection of specific plays. The article concludes with a consideration of the varied canon of modern Chinese drama across different moments in the later twentieth century as it has been established by anthologies in English-speaking countries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".