Translating and Transforming Utopia into the Mandarin Context: Case Studies from China and Taiwan

As of 2016—five hundred years after Utopia was first published—ten editions and nine translators have been involved in various efforts to transfer More’s canonical work into the Mandarin linguistic and cultural context. Despite the seeming abundance of translated Mandarin versions of the work, a systematic study on Utopia has unfortunately never been part of mainstream academia, in either China or Taiwan. This article is an attempt to draw attention to some case studies that demonstrate how Utopia—through translation and paratexts—has stayed alive and active. Like all other translations of Utopia, each of the Mandarin editions is packaged differently, sometimes without many paratexts and at other times with surprisingly copious supplements. This article discusses how Utopia as a term and as a literary work has been perceived and translated into Mandarin. By examining translation and paratext as a set of More’s textual legacy in reference to select case studies, it evaluates the translatability of Utopia during the process of linguistic—and cultural—transferal.