Translation as growth: Xiangsheng’s growing trajectory in China and abroad
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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