Adaptation as Translation: The Representation and Reception of “The Ballad of Mulan” in the Anglophone World

“The Ballad of Mulan”, a well-known ancient Chinese poem recording the story of Mulan who took the place of her aged father to enlist in the army by disguising herself as a man, has been translated many times into English, both interlingually and intersemiotically. The various versions are not dominated by faithfully translated texts but by adaptations represented by Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior (1976) and Disney’s animation Mulan (1998). To further learn about the dissemination of “The Ballad of Mulan” outside of China, this research examines its adaptations and their reception in the anglophone world. Recognizing adaptation as translation by employing Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet’s concept of “equivalence” based on Christine Nord’s preservationadaptation percentage in translation, this study employs a descriptive approach. It first gives a chronological list of the English adaptations of “Mulan” that fall into four major genres (including dramas, novels, picture books, and videogames). It then scrutinizes the features of these adaptations and summarizes three adaptation types. Finally it investigates the acceptance of “Mulan” adaptations of three kinds as per statistics collected from representative websites and mainstream media. It argues that the adaptations altering or fabricating parts of the original story outnumber those of other kinds and are generally the best received.

Keywords:

Adaptation, anglophone world, reception, The Ballad of Mulan translation,

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