Translation as growth: Xiangsheng’s growing trajectory in China and abroad
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To survive in different environments, performances adapt and grow to the measure of the different conditions of reception offered by these contexts. This article reviews the development in China and abroad of xiangsheng, or ‘crosstalk’, a Chinese comic double-act that relies on quickfire exchanges and narrative skills on stage. It brings together a blend of scripted material and improvisation whose address to the audience is immediate. Through the ecological metaphors of growth and using the lens of semiotic translation, we characterise translation as growth and explore the complexities in xiangsheng’s developing trajectories over time. We review xiangsheng’s development in China by examining current archives and research and examine its growth in diasporic performers by combining interviews with semiotic and textual analysis. Our exploration reveals that translation enables the intermingling of political tension, performers’ self-awareness, audiences’ social and cultural background, and the broader historical background of the form itself as it grows and evolves in different times and locations.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".