The entanglement of colonial power's cultural and material manifestations has been an important topic in anticolonial thinking. I tentatively term this the problem of relating the imperial imaginary and imperial reality. This essay focuses on the imaginary and real geographies of the eighteenth-century British maritime empire, using digital methods (custom named entity recognition and mapping) to compare place-names mentioned in maritime fiction and nonfiction with the movements of British ships. In Edward Said's terms, structures of reference are used to see the structures of attitude underpinning the material power of an increasingly global empire. I present four theses on the convergences and divergences between the imaginary empire of texts and real empire of ships: on the centrality of England in both, a shared colonial geography of fungibility, the imaginary's erasure of environmental and bodily restraints, and the imaginary empire's anticipation of, and even preparation for, real imperial domination.

Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is part of a global hypercanon of popular fiction and thus a major commercial enterprise. In the translation of these works, the author and translator are joined by a host of shadowy figures—the source language publisher, scouts, literary agents, target language publishers, editors, and proofreaders—who transform the texts for a particular readership. This essay connects the market-oriented metamorphosis of paratext with substantial alterations to literary content itself. It is based on a computational study of the novels in Swedish and English that singled out major alterations to paragraph meaning and length across the three novels. The study showed that about 6.3% of the paragraphs have been cut or shortened by at least 30%. These extensive changes reveal a process of creative remaking, in which published works become raw content to be reshaped by commercial expectations and the demands of high production speed.

This article analyzes how Chinese writers in the early twentieth century translated and appropriated Russian literature through the intermediary of Japanese scholarly and creative writing. It traces how Japan began as the primary—and in some cases only—cultural broker in the Chinese reception of Russian literature during the late Qing dynasty and how its impact diminished as Western European sources became viable competitors. To illuminate Japan's unique mediating role in shaping Chinese understanding of both Russian literature and China's own literary and linguistic legacy, this article examines Wu Tao's 1907 relay translation of Chekhov's “The Black Monk” from Japanese. By probing the Sino-Japanese cultural connections that gave birth to this translation and comparing it with two later Chinese renderings from English and Russian versions, this article reflects on the factors that determine how intermediaries function in transcultural negotiations.