Where empathy goes untranslated: the Chinese reflexive Ziji and the recoding of perspective in two complete English translations of Hong Lou Meng

Abstract

The Mandarin reflexive ziji is a polyfunctional anaphor which, in logophoric uses, can also contribute to empathy and internal perspective. English himself/herself and his/her own , by contrast, are locally constrained and do not provide a general equivalent for this perspectival potential. The translation of ziji therefore offers a controlled window on the formal recoding of self-reference and on its possible consequences for viewpoint. Drawing on a purpose-built parallel corpus of 1,296 unique ziji -containing sentences from all 120 chapters of Hong Lou Meng , aligned with the Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang translation and the Hawkes–Minford translation, this study annotates every source token for syntactic function and every target rendering for one of five strategies (reflexive, appositive intensifier, possessive own, lexicalization, and zero marking). Three principal findings emerge. First, ZERO (no overt reflexive or intensifying form at the ziji site) is the single most frequent outcome in both translations (63.5% for the Yangs; 49.1% for Hawkes–Minford); these rates measure local formal absence, not necessarily a loss of viewpoint. Second, zero rates track structural affordance: they peak where English grammar offers no categorial equivalent (subject position ziji ) and fall where a direct equivalent exists (object position). A broad contextual cue—the presence of a preceding cognition, perception, or speech predicate—is not significantly associated with ZERO in either translation and is not treated as token-level evidence of logophoricity. Third, on a strictly parallel sub-corpus of 318 Chinese-English sentence pairs, Hawkes–Minford retain overt marking significantly more often than the Yangs (McNemar’s test, p  < 0.001), reversing the conventional characterization of the Yangs as the more source-oriented translators. Qualitative case studies illustrate how viewpoint may be reduced, formally retained, or relocated through other discourse devices but do not estimate the corpus-wide incidence of these outcomes. The study argues that the perspectival consequences of translating ziji must be evaluated at the level of discourse rather than inferred from formal correspondence alone.