1.1 Max Stern

Max Stern (1921–2016) was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Bratislava, then part of Czechoslovakia, as the eldest of seven children. His interest in postage stamps at the age of twelve spurred a lifetime career of stamp collecting and dealing. In the early stages of World War II, his family was protected from deportation because of his father’s job listing books confiscated from the Jews for the Nazis. But with Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the family was torn apart, and his parents and two youngest brothers were captured and gassed at Auschwitz. Stern went into hiding but was finally caught and sent to the concentration camps. His worst experience of camp life was in Sachsenhausen, a labor camp in Oranienburg, Germany, where he arrived in early 1945. Sachsenhausen was not an extermination camp, but Stern suffered doing forced labor under inhumane conditions. He was then sent to Lichtenrade, one of the satellites of Sachsenhausen on the outskirts of Berlin. In April 1945, as Germany was losing the war, the camp was evacuated and all were marched out. Stern set out on the “death march” together with other prisoners, until one day in May, the SS guards were gone and the prisoners became free. On March 2, 1948, his 27th birthday, he married another Jewish survivor, Eva Rosenthal. With the political situation worsening in postwar Czechoslovakia, the couple soon made plans to leave Europe. They arrived in Melbourne, Australia, in July 1948 and built a new life there.

Stern developed his stamp-collecting hobby as a young boy. When war broke out, he had to abandon his engineering studies and work instead in the stamp-dealing business to support his family. The contacts he made through trading stamps protected him during the early years of the war. After moving to Melbourne, he gradually built a stamp empire, his company becoming one of the world’s best known stamp dealers. His experience of the Holocaust and with postage stamps figured among the most influential factors shaping his life.

Stern wrote two memoirs: My Stamp on Life, published by Makor Jewish Community Library in Melbourne in 2003, and The Max Factor: My Life as A Stamp Dealer, also published by Makor, in 2011. Both describe his early life in Bratislava, his survival of the Holocaust, and his stamp-trading career in Australia, but they are different in the extent to which they relate the Holocaust. While My Stamp on Life tells Stern’s life story with the War and the Holocaust as key events, The Max Factor is mostly about the author’s entrepreneurial career in philately, with only the occasional background reference to the Holocaust. My Stamp on Life was issued in Makor’s “Write Your Story” collection, and included in Monash University’s Holocaust Autobiographies Catalogue, a database of over 180 memoirs written by survivors of the Holocaust and published in Australia.Footnote ¹ A publisher specializing in Judaica, Makor promoted both Stern’s Holocaust narrative and his achievements in the stamp-dealing world. They published My Stamp on Life as the memoir of a Holocaust survivor who developed his stamp business, and The Max Factor as the first history of philately in Australia from 1948 to the present day. Since the second book does not have much to do with the Holocaust, my project will focus primarily on My Stamp on Life.

1.2 Olga Horak

Born Olga Rosenberger in Bratislava on August 11, 1926, Olga Horak (1926–) is Stern’s cousin.Footnote ² When war broke out in 1939, she was a young girl emotionally unprepared for the horror unleashed on her and her family. Suffering increasing hardship, the family fled to Hungary, but as the situation worsened there as well, they returned home. In 1944, they were deported from a friend’s house in Bratislava to the transit camp Sered, one of the main collection points for Slovakian Jews. From there they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olga saw how the notorious Dr. Joseph Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” chose prisoners to conduct experiments on, and witnessed the SS carrying out their systematic killing in the camp’s gas chambers. Later she and her mother were transported to Kurzbach, one of the subcamps of Gross Rosen concentration camp, and became part of a forced labor unit. Around Christmas 1944, they started the “death march” toward Gross Rosen, Dresden, and Bergen-Belsen. They were finally rescued from Bergen-Belsen by the British army.

Both Olga’s father and her elder sister were murdered during the Holocaust. She and her mother survived the camps, but her mother died just moments after being registered on the day of Liberation, leaving Olga the sole survivor of her family. On February 9, 1947, she married another Holocaust survivor, John Horak, and the couple emigrated to Australia in September 1949, establishing themselves in Sydney. They built the Hibodress blouse factory and their products became very popular in Australia. Olga Horak’s memoir, Auschwitz to Australia, published by Kangaroo Press in Sydney in 2000, is a testimony describing her suffering and healing. It depicts a young girl maturing into womanhood during and after the Holocaust. Like My Stamp on Life, Horak’s work is included in the Holocaust Autobiographies Catalogue.

Olga Horak’s memoir had as editorial adviser Paul O’Shea, an Australian theologian, educator, and historian whose research focuses on Catholic responses to the Holocaust. He taught for many years in Sydney’s Catholic schools and authored monographs A Cross Too Heavy: Eugenio Pacelli, Politics, and the Jews of Europe, 1917–1943 (Rosenberg Publishing, 2008) and A Cross Too Heavy: Pope Pius XII and the Jews of Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) on the actions and policies of Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) regarding the Holocaust. Given that his research closely relates to European Jewry and the Holocaust, O’Shea was well-suited to edit Horak’s book. In his foreword, he states that he kept Horak’s story and voice as they originally were, limiting his task to suggestions for clarity and accuracy of details (O’Shea Reference O’Shea2000, xii).

O’Shea also makes a comment on Horak’s lack of formal education and rough writing style. According to Horak, her school life had been interrupted for four years, roughly from the age of fifteen to nineteen, due to Nazi persecution; after the war, her request to go back to school was denied and she had to get a job. O’Shea’s idea seems to be that while Horak’s writing style is different from that of other writers, her own voice had to be kept intact. He suggested that instead of weakening her testimony, her style will remind readers of “the awful power wielded by those who engineered and executed the ‘Final Solution’” (O’Shea Reference O’Shea2000, xii).

1.3 Gao Shan

Gao Shan (1958–) is a former high-ranking official at the China National Philatelic Corporation in Beijing, which is affiliated to China Post Group Corporation. He retired as General Manager of the Stamp Distribution Department in 2019, and is now living in his home city, Shenyang in Liaoning Province, in northeast China. I contacted him on August 22, 2022, and we have kept in touch ever since. I initially sent him a questionnaire, asking how he came to translate Holocaust testimony and found a publisher for them. We have never met in person, all our communications taking place via WeChat messages, but he is unfailingly supportive and has responded to all my inquiries.

1.3.3 Book Events

Gao pushed for book launch events to boost the translations. Organized by the Posts and Telecom Press and official philately institutions, they captured the attention of state-run news media. Max Stern attended the event for My Stamp on Life, held on October 29, 2004 at the Traders Hotel in Beijing, and gave a speech (see Figure 1). But Gao chose not to attend because on the podium were people he felt had made false charges against him in his former company. Even though Stern urged him to attend, Gao refused to share the stage with them.

Figure 1 Max Stern at the launch of the translation of My Stamp on Life, with interpreter Wu Di

The event for Olga Horak’s memoir took place on January 27, 2010, at the National Hotel in Beijing. This time Gao was there, but Olga Horak was unable to attend. She made a video appearance to convey her greetings to Chinese readers and remind them that history must not repeat itself. The Australian Embassy in China thought highly of the Chinese translation and sent their Deputy Head of Mission, Graeme Meehan, to give a speech (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 At the launch of the translation of Auschwitz to Australia: (left to right) Jiang Wei, Deputy Director of Posts and Telecom Press, Graeme Meehan, Deputy Head of Mission, Australian Embassy, Beijing, and Gao Shan

The publisher printed and distributed 3,000 copies of Max Stern’s memoir and 2,500 copies of Olga Horak’s. I have not found much information regarding sales, but Gao noted in the questionnaire that the Chinese translation of My Stamp on Life sold out quickly and was reprinted in 2011 in 800 copies, mainly because Stern wanted to sell them in his Melbourne stamp shop.

In 2011, Gao’s translation of Stern’s other book, The Max Factor: My Life as A Stamp Dealer, was published, also by Posts and Telecom Press. Gao used the book, primarily about the stamp business, as practical training material for employees in his company as it apparently worked quite well. Its launch took place in conjunction with the Asian Stamp Exhibition Philatelic Seminar on November 13, 2011, in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. Stern attended the event and gave a speech. Although this book has little to do with Holocaust, the event made Stern, as both stamp dealer and Holocaust survivor, more widely known to Chinese readers. Copies of the Chinese translation of My Stamp on Life were also sold at its event, which marked the last time Stern visited China and met with Gao.

The works by Max Stern and Olga Horak are the only books Gao ever translated. In the next section, I will consider Gao’s self-positioning as a translator and the way his translations were received by Chinese readers.

2.1 Yan Fu’s Xin, Da, and Ya

In his afterword to My Stamp on Life, Gao describes how he took Yan Fu’s three criteria of translation to heart:

Yan Fu (1854–1921) was an educator and translator, famous for introducing China to the Western ideas of Thomas Huxley, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. In his preface to his 1898 translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, Yan proposed the three challenging criteria of good translation, xin (fidelity), da (fluency), and ya (elegance).Footnote ⁷ These would become the gold standard widely pursued and admired in Chinese academic circles. Xin literally means being true, honest, and faithful to the original text; da conveys expressiveness, accessibility, and getting through; and ya comprises the educated, refined quality, and beauty of a language. Both da and ya cater to a smooth, enjoyable reading experience. “The fundamental tenets of twentieth-century Chinese translation theory” (Chan Reference Chan2004, 4), these criteria have shaped an enduring paradigm in the field of Chinese translation.

Gao sought to channel Yan Fu’s translation principles into his work. He described this in some detail with Zhang Yuliang, an old college friend who had emigrated to Australia. In September 2010, Yuliang managed to buy a copy of Gao’s translation of Auschwitz to Australia at the Sydney Jewish Museum. An email discussion followed in which Gao voiced his thoughts on translation:

Even as he shows his high regard for Yan Fu’s three criteria, Gao indicates his personal priority is the fluency of his translations. He privileges their style and elegance over literal fidelity while still conveying the meaning of the originals. Since neither Stern nor Horak is a native speaker of English or a great stylist in writing, Gao’s translations would have to improve on their books. Gao quotes Stern’s casual attitude to autobiographical writing in his preface to The Max Factor: “Autobiographies do not have to care too much about literariness; they only need to express genuine feelings” (Gao Reference Gao2011a). As for Horak, we have in Paul O’Shea’s foreword to the original book, comments on her interrupted education and his intentionally limited linguistic assistance to improve Horak’s writing, both highlighting Horak’s own, presumably plainer style. All of this begs the question, how does Gao reconcile his own desire for elegance with the originals’ lack of refinement?

2.2 Elegance vs Roughness

Since Gao cites Stern’s casual approach to autobiographical writing and clearly reads O’Shea’s foreword to Horak’s memoir, we know he was fully aware of the roughness of the originals. But unlike O’Shea who considers the survivor’s plain writing valuable evidence of the impact the Nazi regime had on her education, Gao decides to enhance and refine the original texts to create better books for his readers. Explaining his approach in his afterword to The Max Factor, Gao first shares how Stern explicitly granted him a free hand in his translations:

With the author’s permissive attitude in mind, Gao appears to have felt entitled to prioritize the transmission of the original’s overall meaning rather than its words or syntax. He went on to describe his method of translation:

Gao conveys a robust confidence in this approach. He believed that by enriching the original he was better able to stay “true” to it. He threw himself into the work, on top of a heavy workload at his day job. He later recalled his state of mind when translating:

This is how Gao identified with his authors, stepped into their mental world, and put his own ideas into the originals. The statements were made in his paratext to The Max Factor, but it is the same approach he brought to the previous two translations. He neglected Yan Fu’s criterion of fidelity and pursued “elegance” and refinement by altering the original texts wherever he felt this was necessary. In translating O’Shea’s foreword to Auschwitz to Australia, Gao omitted O’Shea’s analysis of Horak’s rough style and inserted his own reflections on Horak’s extraordinary personality in the face of the Holocaust, emphasizing the severity of the hardships she underwent, the indelible imprint they left on her life, and her resilience and diligence. He hoped to bring to his target audience an elevating and didactic book, assuming that the historical lessons and spiritual encouragement were what readers should get from reading Horak’s life story.

It’s important to note that Gao was not providing a translation service like most professional translators do. His strong grip on the books originated in his relationship with the authors, especially with Stern, which we can glimpse from Stern’s side as well. When the Chinese translation of Auschwitz to Australia was published, Gao sent a copy of it, and later a DVD of the book launch, to Stern. Stern replied by email to Gao:

In two subsequent emails conveying greetings, Stern said to Gao:

These emails highlight the value Stern placed on his friendship with Gao. He was clearly aware of the challenges Gao faced in making the testimonies available to Chinese readers, and he emphasized his gratitude for Gao’s crucial role in translating and securing publication for his and Horak’s books in China. He took Gao as a warm-hearted and capable friend who was doing him a favor in bringing their Holocaust stories to broader audiences. Unlike in many cases where translators find themselves in an inferior position, Gao felt no such pressure from the authors; he was not a translator servant who expected to work gingerly for the author master; instead, he and the authors were friends and collaborators on an equal footing. This may have led Gao to feel justified in following a translation style that suited his own mind.

However, Gao signaled his approach only in the afterword to his third translation (of The Max Factor), not the two testimonies. In the afterword to My Stamp on Life, he said he followed Yan Fu’s xin-da-ya as the golden rule guiding his translation, but he did not mention his preference for two of them (with, as a correlative, neglect of the third). He voiced his principle of aiming at faithfulness to the overall meaning (rather than word-for-word or sentence-for-sentence) and his privileging of readability and elegance over strict verbal accuracy only in a private email to a friend. This means that he gives no indication of his unorthodox method to the general readership of the two testimonies.

2.3 Reader Reviews

Reader reviews can play a paramount role as platforms for accessing a translated text. Apart from the train conductor’s letter accompanying the return of Gao’s lost manuscript discussed in Section 1, there are a few short essays reviewing Gao’s translations, the most important being two news reports appearing in People’s Daily on January 9, 2005 and March 19, 2010, both by the journalist Yuan Xi. People’s Daily represents the official voice of the Chinese central government and is the most influential and authoritative daily newspaper in contemporary China. These reports reviewed the Chinese translation of My Stamp on Life and Auschwitz to Australia, taking them as commemorative publications for the 60th and 65th, respectively anniversaries of victory in the global war against fascism and of the liberation of Auschwitz. They affirm the value of both books in preserving Holocaust survivors’ memories and passing on the historical lessons drawn from the Holocaust, thus preventing genocide and other serious crimes, and promoting a culture of peace across the world.

I also found two short commentaries on the Chinese translation of My Stamp on Life and nine short commentaries on Auschwitz to Australia on Douban.com, a popular online book platform in China. For the first book, the reviews revealed readers’ surprise at Stern’s legendary life experience. One reader expressed astonishment that Stern’s “hobby and work in stamp collection could be so useful in helping him escape Nazi persecution” (Anonymous, December 6, 2007). Stern describes just that – how, in the early period of the war, his connections with the Slovak secret police through stamp dealing helped him escape arrest. His stamp trade also generated foreign exchange for the government, which exempted him from deportation. All of this increased his chances of survival. Many Chinese readers were drawn to Stern’s autobiography because of their own passion for collecting and selling postage stamps, and they appreciated the role of philately in Stern’s wartime struggles. For the second book, basically, all the reviews describe the readers’ shock at Nazi cruelty and their sympathy for the Jewish victims. For example, one reader wrote “[through this book] I keenly felt the suffering endured by the Jews subjected to Nazi persecution” (Anonymous, February 22, 2012).

Nearly all the reviews of the two translations that I have seen concern the lessons of the Holocaust; no one compares the books with their originals. Of course, most Chinese readers do not have access to the foreign original and can only comment from the target side. However, I saw a special review from Yuliang, who lived in Australia and had managed to read both the original and the translation of the Horak book. In an email to Gao on October 31, 2010, he made the following comments:

Yuliang’s admiration for Gao’s proficiency with Yan Fu’s da and ya does not preclude his noticing Gao’s neglect of xin and the unfaithfulness of his translation. Nonetheless, Yuliang justifies this shortcoming by pointing out the necessity of sometimes improving the original’s unpolished writing style. He agrees with Gao that translators should actively engage in reshaping a text to enhance the reader’s overall comprehension of it and acknowledges the value of Gao’s alterations in making the essence of the books more accessible to target readers.

This section has shown how Gao fashioned himself in the role of translator. Various paratextual materials illustrate how he invokes Yan Fu’s three criteria of translation while putting his own personal interpretation on them, how he reconciles this standard with the original textual reality, and the kinds of responses he gets from readers. He privileges fluency and elegance at the expense of fidelity; by virtue of his friendship with the authors, he determines to refine the originals with genuine devotion; and his translations seem to enjoy a largely positive reception. However, as Genette stresses at the end of his monograph, paratexts are “only an assistant, only an accessory of the text” (Reference Genette1997, 410); the meaning of a translated text depends on the translation itself, rather than on the discourse around it. Hence, the following sections will cross the threshold and examine the actual translations.

3.1 Readability

I find Gao’s intention to increase his translations’ accessibility especially evident in the way he tackles various foreign, culture-specific items – words and phrases that refer to historical events, Jewish customs, or camp life in German, Yiddish, Slovak, and other foreign languages, appearing in both Stern’s and Horak’s books. The difficulty in translating items of this kind usually emerges through “denotative or connotative lacunae” (Bodeker Reference Bodeker, Kittel and Frank1991, 65), or the discrepancy in information between the original and the target lexicons. Leaving these items untranslated or unexplained in translations may pose a problem for the reader if they are restricted to the source culture, and either nonexistent or bearing a different intertextual status in the receiving environment.

Academic discussions that provide substantial or serviceable guidelines for translating information-loaded terms tend to be scarce. In a 1996 article, Javier Franco Aixelá published a systematic survey of the various strategies to render culture-specific terms. Translators, he suggests, have a number of options, “ranging from conservation (acceptance of the difference by means of the reproduction of the cultural signs in the source text) to naturalization (transformation of the other into a cultural replica)” (Aixelá Reference Aixelá, Álvarez and Vidal1996, 54). His discussion gives us a glimpse of translators’ concerns in treating the source text, particularly their wish to maintain readability. Following Aixelá, I will tease out Gao’s renderings of the original items and divide them into four categories. Instead of attempting a complete presentation of all such translations here, I intend to select a couple of typical examples to illustrate my classification of the methods Gao adopts.

Gao’s first method is to translate a term literally and then add a note at the bottom of the page to explain its implications. The supplementary explanation is put in the form of footnotes, distinguished from the main text to avoid illegitimate mixture. For example, the Nazi word “KAPO” (Horak Reference Horak2000, 38) was transliterated into Chinese characters on the basis of phonetic similarity, “卡波” (Horak Reference Horak2010, 43), and Gao’s note explains it refers to a prisoner functionary assigned by the SS to supervise forced labor in the concentration camps.

In Gao’s translation of My Stamp on Life, there are thirty-five translator’s notes in total. Of these, twenty-two concern people, places, historical events, or organizations concerning the Holocaust, the Second World War or European history; seven have to do with Jewish languages and culture; three are related to stamps, letters, or numismatics; two are concerned with Australian history; and one, at the beginning of the Chapter “China—A New Experience,” informs the reader that this chapter was written by Stern exclusively for the Chinese translation of the book. In the Chinese version of Auschwitz to Australia, there are altogether forty-seven translator’s notes, of which thirty-three are about people, places, historical events, or laws concerning the Holocaust, World War II or European culture; eight are about Jewish language and culture; five are about Australian culture or history; and one is on the “Mohawk” hairstyle (named after a native American people) in which a concentration camp guard shaved a woman (as humiliation) to punish her for stealing bread. None is about stamps or letters (as the original Horak story contains next to nothing about stamps).

In addition to employing footnotes, Gao also integrates explanatory information directly into the main text, so as not to disrupt the reader’s attention. For example, sometime around late September/early October 1944, Horak saw a camp as she exited the train and knew she had arrived at Birkenau. When the term “Birkenau” appears in the main text, Gao inserts a few lines of introduction to Auschwitz-Birkenau for the target reader without breaking into the original narration for too long. Translators usually maintain brevity and subtlety in their intratextual supplements. However, some of Gao’s intratextual glosses are very long. An extreme example is his translation of the German term Kindertransport, referring to a British program to rescue Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territories just before the outbreak of World War II. Horak mentions “Kindertransport” in her memoir as a last-ditch effort of Jewish parents to save their children, though her own parents, wanting to keep the family together, decided not to send her and her sister. Gao translated the term into Chinese as “‘挽救儿童’计划” [‘Rescue the Children’ Program] (Horak Reference Horak2010, 9) and explained in an extraordinarily long gloss, six paragraphs in total, the tragic situation of Jewish children, the requirements of the British government, the number of children transported, and their lives with host families in England. Gao seemed to consider this information important for the readers to know, and thus did not limit himself to the original text, nor was he bothered by the potentially excessive length of the gloss.

In other occurrences of foreign-language terms appearing in the source texts, Gao did not supply extra information. Instead, he rendered them using techniques known as generalization and explicitation. Generalization here means the translator replaces some words and phrases with broader, more universal references. For example, “Yomim Noraim” (Stern Reference Stern2003, 77), referring to the High Holy Days, strictly Juadaism’s two most important holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Gao translates more generally as “犹太节” [Jewish Festival] (Stern Reference Stern2004, 66). Explicitation is used to make the connotations of the original term more visible to the target readers. Elisabet Titik Murtisari, who has studied the concept, describes it as elusive, pointing out that it may include “shifts resulting in a more general expression than the corresponding [source text]” (Murtisari Reference Murtisari2016, 68). But, I see the two concepts as distinct from each other. Whereas generalization tends to blur the source text information, explicitation clarifies it. Contrary to generalization, explicitation moves to a higher degree of specificity and particularity. For example, the “Nuremberg Laws” (Horak Reference Horak2000, 1), a set of antisemitic laws enacted by the Nazis in 1935, was translated into “纽伦堡种族法” [Nuremberg Laws of Ethnicity] (Horak Reference Horak2010, 3), with its ethnic aspect made explicit.

Finally, there are words and phrases that Gao just omitted and did not translate at all. Examples include “Volksdeutscher” (Stern Reference Stern2003, 40), a term used by Nazis to refer to ethnic Germans living outside of Germany with no German citizenship, and “Wahrman Utca on Kresz Geza Utca” (Horak Reference Horak2000, 16), the place where Horak’s family rented a flat when hiding in Hungary in 1943. The omitted references are mostly names that denote certain detailed objects and have no significant connotations. Gao presumably thought of them as trivial information, not warranting the comprehension effort required of the reader, nor their loss substantially affecting readers’ understanding.

Gao adopts various methods to make his translations more readable. Since notes heavy with information can hinder fluent reading, he doesn’t add a note to all culture-specific items, but uses his own discrimination to grant some of his supplementary explanations as intratextual gloss, while others are concisely translated by generalization or explicitation, and still others are simply omitted, alleviating the burden of comprehension. Gao uses diverse techniques to deal with such terms because he cares about the reading experience of his target audience. As indicated by his statements on prioritizing fluency, he is committed to the role of translator as responsible mediator who makes it easier for readers to understand the message the author wishes to convey. It should be acknowledged that the multilingual nature of the authors’ Auschwitz experience is lost in his translations. Culture-specific items in the originals are written mostly in non-English words. Their inclusion could give English readers an authentic sense of the historicity of the narrated events. In translation, however, they become monolingual Chinese, their foreign, polyglot characteristics erased. As a result, the translated texts become flatter than the original, and target readers cannot sense the language mixture in the originals or have a similarly layered reading experience.

3.2 Enhanced Elegance

To enhance his translations’ style and make them more elegant, Gao intervenes with numerous additions – incisive summaries, comments on life and human nature, invented stories, and descriptive passages expanding on events in the originals. This is especially noticeable in the translation of Olga Horak’s Auschwitz to Australia. In his paratexts, Gao states that he privileges readability and elegance over accuracy, but he says almost nothing about his copious additions, which are not only sizable, they are unmarked. He puts many of these additions in the author-survivor’s (implied) voice. Hence, the reader without access to the original will not be able to tell which part comes solely from the translator and will thus read the entire text, including Gao’s additions, as the words of the original author.

Gao’s pursuit of elegance comprises two tiers of meaning. First, he refines the language, polishing his expressions until they look smooth and graceful to him. Second, he deepens the theme. He tries to see through the surface phenomena, reflect on them, and bring to the target reader what he thinks is the truth that can be extracted from the author’s experience. He expects the interventions to enhance the quality of his translated texts, making them more worthwhile reads for the target reader. In this section, I will present three types of textual additions for elegance: idioms and phrases, scenery descriptions, and reflections on the Holocaust.

First, Gao polishes the original texts by adding Chinese idioms and four-character phrases. Traditional Chinese idioms are mostly four-character set expressions originating in vivid stories of Chinese culture, history, and society. As they express complicated ideas with wit and wisdom, their use demonstrates a writer’s high cultural literacy and adds flavor and energy to the writing. Apart from the use of idioms, Gao invents new four-character phrases which have similar linguistic effects.

One example concerns Olga Horak’s loss of the family property. After the war, when Horak returned home to see her parents’ property, she was bluntly told by the Kramars family who had leased it from her parents that the place was no longer hers. They told her they were convinced its previous Jewish owners were dead, and had purchased the estate under the previous Slovakian regime. This is Horak’s narration alongside Gao’s translation, with Gao’s additions underlined:

Obviously, Horak was disappointed at the loss of her family’s property, but she didn’t argue and just left. Gao suggests the new owners fabricated stories to fool Horak and it was all baseless talk. He adds two strongly negative phrases: a four-character expression “举家抢房” (the whole family snatches the property) and an old Chinese idiom “鸠占鹊巢” (the turtledove occupies the magpie’s nest)Footnote ⁹ to imply the seizure of another’s residence by force. By using this idiom to describe the later family’s occupying the estate in an arrogant and unreasonable way, Gao suggests the postwar social disorder as well as the coldness of the human heart. It seems to me that Gao made these comments because he identified with the author, was keen to speak for Horak, and thus hastened to take up the cudgels on her behalf.

Gao’s additions appear not only as single-sentence idioms, but also as prolific private fantasies and thoughts filling whole paragraphs. This is a more drastic move to enhance the works’ elegance. The additions are as imaginative as they are extensive, often crafted in beautiful, delicate (if sometimes corny) Chinese prose. Through his fabrications, Gao is highly skilled in making them harmonize with the given topic to fit seamlessly in the original. As an example, I will show the scenery embroidered onto Horak’s narrative of moving between camps.

In the winter of 1944, Horak and her mother were sent to Kurzbach where they were made to do forced labor. While the prisoners trudged along the snowy road to their worksite, Gao added the following depiction:

Obviously, the parent bird and its young suggest a parallel to Horak and her mother. In an effort to appreciate the female protagonist’s state of mind, Gao creates this scene to imply Horak and her mother were sticking together in difficult times. The description gently intensifies the atmosphere, making the target readers more sympathetic and protective of the Jewish prisoners in their distress. Additions like this far exceed the normal remit of a translator, but they surely increase the literary flair of the translation, while possibly appearing platitudinous and hackneyed to some critical eyes.

In his comments on the translation of Auschwitz to Australia (accessed on September 7, 2022), Gao wrote that he considered it a deficiency that the author only narrated events superficially, without reflection on the nature of Nazi atrocities; he seemed to consider such reflections indispensable benefits for his target readers. For example, Horak witnessed Joseph Mengele, notoriously cruel doctor at Auschwitz, perform all kinds of hideous medical experiments on prisoners. Her memoir mentions his obscene experiments on young female prisoners, his injecting blue dye into children, and other brutal, sadistic behavior. Gao goes further in his translation, offering a comment on why the Nazis would commit such inhuman crimes:

The original testimony solely recounts the crimes that took place in the camp and does not delve into Nazi methods. While other translators might consider this a feature of the original’s unique mode of narration and treat it as such, Gao clearly does not interpret the lack as an authorial style choice he needs to respect. Instead, he chooses to elaborate on these descriptions by summarizing the nature of the Nazis’ inhuman acts, analyzing their motivations, and offering a more explicit critique of their killing systems at Auschwitz. Perhaps Gao reckons his readers would find the heinous crimes unfathomable, and with his remark on the nature of death at Auschwitz he tries to penetrate to truth. Killings became routine, common, and mechanical, at the death factory, the killers so accustomed to it that no pain could tug at their heartstrings. I believe Gao’s additions, if not profound or brilliant, are unquestionably useful in supplementing the original testimonies. His additions provide general Chinese readers, who often have very little knowledge of the Holocaust, with a much stronger appreciation of the themes and significance found in Horak’s memoir. Therefore, the Chinese translation does not limit itself to relating horrible surface phenomena but taps into “deeper thought” through the translator’s interventions.

These additions serve to make the translated texts more elegant, albeit at the expense of fidelity to the originals. And elegance, as a criterion of Yan Fu’s tripartite dictum for translation, has always been disputed among translation practitioners and scholars. It is fidelity that is usually assumed to take prominence over other requirements to guarantee a translation’s credibility. Gao’s huge amount of intervention goes against normal translation conventions. So why did he tailor the originals according to his personal literary taste? I turn to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological ideas for a possible interpretation.

3.3 Transference of Habitus

Pierre Bourdieu offers a model to capture the social context of translation. He formulates the concept of “habitus” as the “supra-individual dispositions capable of functioning in a … collective way” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2000, 156). According to Michaela Wolf’s summary of the key concepts of Bourdieu’s cultural sociology, “habitus” is the principle of perception, appreciation and action acquired by individuals through experience and socialization; it is a set of embodied dispositions naturally and durably adapted to a certain professional field (Wolf Reference Wolf, Gambrier and van Doorslaer2010, 339). Social agents have their habitus shaped by their various types of “capital,” that is, the accumulated labor or disposable resources agents own or represent. Bourdieu classifies them into four types: economic capital (material possessions), social capital (networks of family members, friends, and colleagues), cultural capital (education, knowledge, etc.), and symbolic capital (prestige and social honor) (Wolf Reference Wolf, Gambrier and van Doorslaer2010, 339). The distribution of these different forms of capital is responsible for the operation of social forces.

I found Bourdieu’s concepts of “habitus” and “capital” useful in interpreting Gao’s bold interventions and disregard for fidelity. As a leader of a large state-owned corporation, Gao presumably received a reasonable salary and possessed enough economic capital. He had close connections with many important people in the postal business. His social capital worked quite well for the publication of his translations because he knew the directors and editors in the Posts and Telecom Press personally. He was also very knowledgeable and experienced in stamp dealings, and had published monographs on stamps and letters – he undoubtedly possessed significant cultural capital. Last but not least, by occupying the leading position at his company, he acted as a symbol of authority and thus had great symbolic capital.

Rich in the four types of capital, Gao is confident and competent in the management of stamps. He may be only an amateur in translation, but he is a big name in Chinese postal circles. Sameh Hanna points out that the hierarchy of social classes is one of the factors constituting what Bourdieu calls a “field of power,” and conditions practices within the field of translation (Hanna Reference Hanna2016, 200). Gao, at the top of the hierarchical order at his company, is inclined to translate the books in the same authoritative manner he displays in his stamp business. Since habitus is socialized and internalized as an unconscious disposition, I speculate Gao transfers the competence of his habitus in the stamp world to the world of translation. This might well explain why he prefers not to be constrained by the original texts and makes additions until the translated texts align with his taste. The capital Gao possesses in the stamp world grants him significant autonomy in producing his translations, just as it enables him to promote them by organizing book launch events.

Gao aims at both easier accessibility and a higher aesthetic quality of the translated texts, bringing the works up to his own standards and having them radically localized. This approach, however, raises serious ethical issues. He breaks into the originals’ territory and makes drastic appropriations for himself. In this way, he becomes the de facto commentator, rewriter, and coauthor of the works by the two survivors, though what he produces is presented and perceived as translation. Fascinated by Yan Fu’s tripartite xin-da-ya dictum, Gao may have known about Yan’s way of dealing with his own fidelity challenge while translating Evolution and Ethics. His statement, in his preface to this work, explaining his departure from fidelity can help us understand Yan’s practice. He explains his departure from fidelity as follows:

Yan Fu confesses to his reader that he elaborated, paraphrased, and added to the original texts, which could explain why Gao says the translator’s enrichment of the original is “a common thing in the field of translation” (Gao Reference Gao2011b, 193). Instead of being submissive, he sees his role as active. Instead of delivering an identical reproduction of two Holocaust survivors’ testimonies into Chinese, he aims to facilitate the understanding of the Jewish survivors’ experience among Chinese readers. He endeavors to inspire, impress, and enlighten through the many additions he thinks will work for the benefit of his readers.

4.1 Translator as Secondary Witness

The idea of secondary witness dates back to Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst engaged in the practical treatment of trauma survivors. Based on his own multiple roles – as child survivor of the Holocaust himself, interviewer of other survivors, and scholar researching Holocaust testimonials – he understands various perspectives and recognizes three distinct levels of witnessing: “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself” (Laub Reference Laub, Felman and Laub1992b, 75). The first level arises from his own experience as a survivor as he vividly remembers his deportation, the camps, and his childhood afterwards. The second level proceeds from his participation in eliciting and forming other survivors’ accounts. As the interviewer and immediate receiver of testimony, he empathetically relives and reexperiences the Holocaust together with the interviewees, and acts as a companion in their journey back to past sorrows. The third refers to the process of witnessing the narrator’s and listener’s process of witnessing. As a researcher, he reflects on the narrator’s and listener’s behavior, checks the veracity of the story, builds links to the present, and sees if they are reaching the truth. The second of Laub’s three levels of witnessing is what scholars later defined as “secondary witness.”

Aleida Assmann creates a dual model of witnessing comprising two roles: the primary witness has the experiencing role of one who goes through the ordeal, while the secondary witness serves a testifying role describing to others what happened in the name of those who are no longer able to speak for themselves. She then compares the religious martyr and the Holocaust witness, and points out that one of their differences lies in the separation or fusion of primary and secondary witnessing. After the martyr dies, it is up to a bystander to tell their story, hence the two layers of witnessing are separate: the martyr as the first witness (through personal experience), and the bystander as the second witness (helping describe the martyr’s story to others). By contrast, these two layers are conflated in the case of the Holocaust testimony, where the person who experiences the massacre is the same who testifies to it.

Assmann insightfully suggests two points of view in which the experiencing and testifying roles can be clearly marked for the Holocaust witness. The first is to consider those who died and were forever silenced in the Holocaust as the primary witnesses, and those who were spared the worst and were able to write a testimony as the secondary witnesses who speak not for themselves but for the other dead victims. The second is to view the survivor in the role of the primary witness, and the receivers of the testimony in the role of secondary witnesses, defining the latter as the person who “listens to the testimony with empathy, and helps record, store, and transmit it” (Assmann Reference Assmann2006, 269). She also noted that “the secondary witness is the point of origin not of the event itself but of its story and transmission” (Assmann Reference Assmann2006, 269). Then, a variety of agents – recording, transcribing, translating, and communicating the testimonial stories for the survivors – may be counted as secondary witness.

Sharon Deane-Cox first recast the translator of Holocaust testimony as a secondary witness in the transmission of the survivor’s memory. To her, the translator is a secondary witness because he or she “as a hermeneutic listener to and receiver of the survivor’s lived experience plays a fundamental role in its reconstruction and retranslation” (Reference Deane-Cox2013, 311). The translator obtains knowledge of the Holocaust by listening to or reading the testimony, and witnesses for its author by retelling it to a new audience. They are one step removed from the lived experience being recounted, but play an essential and generative role in the transmission of Holocaust memory. In this way, the author of the testimony or the Holocaust survivor can be viewed as the primary witness, while the translator of the testimony, as the receiver of the survivor’s testimony, can be viewed as the secondary witness.

The role of secondary witnessing puts the translator of Holocaust testimony into a more definite subject position. In interviewing survivors and enabling a testimony, the listener partakes in the victims’ struggle with their traumatic past. That is to say, the secondary witness claims a full role in the translingual reconstruction of the testimony. If we follow Deane-Cox’s lead and call the translator of Holocaust testimony a secondary witness, we can say that the translator is definitely entitled to claim a visible presence in the translation. The presence rather than invisibility of translators is necessarily justified in the translation of Holocaust testimony.

The concept of secondary witness is helpful in explaining Gao’s method of presenting his translations to target readers, and specifically why, in the paratexts accompanying his translations, Gao both stresses his intimacy with the authors and draws a comparison between the German Nazis and the Japanese invaders of China. He engages in secondary witnessing in his translations, even if not explicitly cognizant of the role.

4.2 Intimacy with the Authors

Laub asserts that bearing witness to trauma demands “a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other” (Reference Laub, Felman and Laub1992a, 70; italics in the original). Therefore, the translator, as secondary witness, must be there with the author, to listen to the author’s story, and to be empathetically engaged with the author’s narration. They need to be active in reconstituting, mediating, and transmitting the survivor’s memory. For this reason, the translator tends in paratexts to prominently display their bonding and intimate connection with the author: striving to prove to readers their personal ties with the author, they demonstrating how they know them well and thus can understand them correctly. This corresponds to Peter Davies’ observation that translators of Holocaust memoirs do not usually emphasize professional distance or objectivity but instead try to show their personal contact or intimate connections through family or friendship with the author. As he concisely puts it:

In other words, translators actually highlight their intimate connection with the author to enhance their translation’s value, despite the potential benefits of maintaining professional distance for more objectivity. As Davies shows, Elie Wiesel, in praising his wife Marion Wiesel’s retranslation of Night, underscored that she “knows my voice and how to transmit it better than anyone else” (Wiesel Reference Wiesel2008, xiii). He emphasized their relationship as a positive aspect of her retranslation. Closeness between translator and author of a Holocaust testimony may be seen to give a translated text an advantage.

Gao, too, stresses his intimacy with the authors, especially with Max Stern. In his preface to My Stamp on Life, an essay titled “Lao Ma, An Elderly Foreigner Whom I Respect,” he introduces his friend Max Stern to Chinese readers. “Lao Ma” is a Chinese nickname Gao gave Stern playing on the similarity of his first name “Max” to the Chinese family name “Ma.” “Lao” is an adjectival adjunct denoting familiarity, often used before an address as a term of endearment or intimacy (Lin Reference Lin1972, 180). By calling Stern “Lao Ma,” Gao conveys the sense of his close relationship with the author. Apart from that, since “Ma” literally means a horse, an animal symbolizing energy, health, and strength, this nickname carries positive connotations, suggesting Stern’s resilience in the face of Nazi cruelty and his long-term commitment to the stamp business.

In the same preface, Gao provides a detailed account of how he came to know Stern, recounting their business meetings and shared meals. Their relation was summarized as follows:

He shows the readers that they are like-minded close friends. Although his relation with Olga Horak was not as close, he still tries in his preface to Auschwitz to Australia to highlight his connection to her. He begins by invoking his Holocaust survivor friend Stern who suggested the translation of his cousin Olga Horak’s memoir, and Horak’s unreserved endorsement of his work. He lets the readers know that he was able to contact the author and consult her on any question he had while translating.

The translator’s personal connection with the survivor authors is of prime importance for the translated text. By stressing this intimacy, Gao maintains a connection with the primary witnesses’ experience and seeks to deliver a seamless chain of witnessing. Detailed descriptions of their interactions will enhance the credibility and authority of his translations.

4.3 Comparing Chinese Wartime Experience to the Holocaust

Bettina Stumm points out an inherent self-centeredness of secondary witnesses of the Holocaust: “Witnessing others is inescapably self-referential: I experience others for myself through my sensory perceptions and identification with them, seeing them in relation to me” (Reference Stumm, Nelson, Szabo and Zimmermann2010, 355). She suggests that “secondary witnesses are apt to assimilate the unfamiliar to that which they have experienced or can understand” (Reference Stumm, Nelson, Szabo and Zimmermann2010, 356). Often considered a bad thing, self-centeredness is also a common, inevitable phenomenon. As secondary witness, the translator of Holocaust testimony may resort to familiar sufferings from their own context in order to understand.

In witnessing for Jewish victims, Gao uses his paratexts to recall the suffering of Chinese people during the Japanese invasion of World War II, as a more familiar experience to himself and his target readers. Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan were also military allies. Both countries were guilty of committing war crimes in neighboring countries: While Nazis murdered Jews across Europe, Japan engaged in campaigns of mass killings in conquered territories in Asia, and forced women from Korea, China, and other occupied countries into sexual slavery. The Nazi camps, in Levi’s words, were “the culmination of Fascism in Europe, its most monstrous manifestation”(Levi Reference Levi1987, 390), while Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 marked the apex of Japanese fascism. The Holocaust and the Japanese atrocities in China may be considered crimes of fascist powers that bear some resemblance.

In his afterword to My Stamp on Life, Gao compares the remembrance culture in Germany and Japan after World War II:

Here, Gao hints at praise for postwar Germany’s commendable efforts to confront its role as the perpetrator in the Holocaust. They have given restitution to heirs of the victims, promoted a culture of commemoration, and increased education about the Holocaust among their youth. It seems much harder for Japan to establish a critical dialogue with their serious crimes in the past. In contrast to Germany’s acknowledgment of responsibility, there is no consensus or clear position to deal with war crimes in Japan’s official politics (Schmidt Reference Schmidt2016, 1–2). Gao saw Japan’s attitude toward history as opposite to Germany’s responsible gesture. He condemns the Yasukuni Shrine, controversial symbol of Japan’s war legacy. A Shinto shrine in Tokyo, built to commemorate Japan’s soldier casualties since the Meiji Period (1868–1912), it lists among its 2.5 million dead roughly 1,000 war criminals, including 14 A-Class criminals.Footnote ¹¹ Enshrinement of Japan’s worst convicted war criminals has led to many controversies and visits by some Japanese politicians to the Shrine have damaged Japan’s relations with other Asian countries such as China and South Korea.

The Chinese translation of My Stamp on Life was published in October 2004. I notice that Gao’s afterword is dated September 18, the memorial day to the so-called 9.18 Incident or the Mukden Incident. On September 18, 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army attacked the Manchurian city of Mukden (now Shenyang, Gao’s home city), the beginning of their invasion of all of Manchuria. An incident contrived by the Japanese army to conquer China by force, it marked the beginning of China’s war of resistance against Japan’s invasion. Presumably, when Gao was preparing the afterword, he was affected by this special memorial date, and recalled Japan in his reflections on the Holocaust.

The connection may have been prompted more broadly by international relations in the early 2000s, when a wave of anti-Japanese public mobilization swept across China (Reilly Reference Reilly2012, 99–100). In 2001, Japan’s Ministry of Education authorized a new conservative history textbook for use in schools. The textbook downplayed the nature of Japan’s military aggression in the wars invading China and South Korea, sparking anti-Japanese sentiment in Chinese media and society. At the time of Gao’s translation work, roughly 2003 to 2005, Japan’s Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited the Shrine annually, despite protests from the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Hence my speculation is that when Gao was working on the translations, contemporary international events likely spurred his comments on the sharp contrast between Germany’s and Japan’s repentance for their history of invasion. In his preface to the Chinese translation of Auschwitz to Australia, Gao quotes Stern on the central importance of this history:

Though Gao quotes Stern for the parallel between Germany and Japan, it seems to represent his own view as well. When his translation of Olga Horak’s book was reviewed in People’s Daily shortly after, Gao shared a relevant personal experience:

His own traumatic experience enables Gao to empathize with the primary witnesses’ suffering and relay it to target readers. With the Japanese atrocities in his own memory, Gao believes he “had the same feelings with the author.” This is where we get into the radical implications of the “translator as secondary witness” idea. If the translator is to try to recount the original author’s story, better results can be achieved when that translator conveys it experientially. Representing the original Holocaust experience for his survivor authors is precisely the point of Gao’s witnessing. To do that, the translated text has to possess an experiential “feel” for its recipients. Strictly speaking, of course, Gao cannot possibly convey the exact feeling of his authors’ experiences because he did not go through the Holocaust himself. So if he wants to convey the lived experience of their trauma, he will need to generate this out of something else – specifically, out of that which most closely corresponds to the Holocaust in his own experience. Anything less would be to fail in his role as secondary witness. Gao reaches into his individual experience to find something comparable. This is why he turns to China’s wartime encounter with Japanese atrocities.

Strictly speaking, however, the Holocaust is fundamentally different in several aspects from the Chinese wartime experience. David Engel discusses the Nazi notion of the “pathogen” essential to their drive to exterminate the Jews. While the Jews did not see themselves as essentially different from other people, they were singled out from their neighbors and considered “a pathogen that threatened to destroy all humanity” (Engel Reference Engel2000, 4). For Hitler, the mission of eliminating the Jews was “a kind of crusade to redeem the world” (Friedländer Reference Friedländer2008, xviii). Unlike the Jews, Chinese war victims knew they were part of an entire country under attack by foreign invaders. The Holocaust is also special in the way Nazis deliberately created what Primo Levi calls the “Lager,” the camp and all it implied – a pitting of inmates against each other in a desperate struggle for survival. In this respect, the true horror of the “Lager” and by implication the Holocaust could come out: not just “us” against “them,” (China vs Japan), but ultimately everyone against each other, (Jewish prisoners vs Jewish prisoners). Furthermore, the Holocaust was a highly systematic and sustained genocide. The Nazis made an industrial attempt to exterminate an entire people and culture from the world. They designed and perfected diabolically versatile systems of collective killing. They built gigantic death machines and deliberately, horrendously destroyed millions of human lives. The Japanese invaders did not. In the stationary, unchanging quality of prison conditions (vs dealing with an invading army passing through), or in terms of “playing for time” (hoping to defer execution long enough to merely survive), the Holocaust was clearly different. To sum up, by drawing this analogy, Gao obviously smoothed out all these differences, and what disappears in the analogy is any sense of the distinctiveness of the Holocaust situation.

Whatever it lacks in rigor, the parallel appeared natural enough to Gao as he introduced Holocaust testimonies to his Chinese audience. The survivors’ narrations jogged his own memory and he oscillated between personal experience and attuning to the originals’ concentration camp world. In witnessing the Holocaust, he draws on the Japanese atrocities because they are the nearest equivalent to the European genocide for the receiving environment. They will pull the Chinese audience closer to the Jewish victims and thus enhance their empathetic engagement with Holocaust survivors. In this way, Gao contextualizes his translations by drawing a comparison not found in Western translations of Holocaust testimonies. His practice invites us to think about the representability of the Holocaust experience in an entirely different way. Specifically, it forces us to explore the extent to which representability (as the base for translation) is dependent on the experiential background of readers, and how an experience can be better represented, especially when there is no corresponding equivalent in the lived experience of its audience.

Rendering experiences a text wishes to convey can be a lot trickier than initially supposed; it isn’t just a matter of conveying as accurately as possible the literal meaning of the original. Instead, the translator needs to consider how that text will work on its new audience, and the exact or specific effect it’s likely to have on them. If the target audience for the translated text doesn’t possess the same understanding of either the words or the phenomena described by the original, a literal translation is unlikely to be a success. If Chinese history includes nothing quite like the Nazi Lager, it can be extremely difficult for a Chinese audience to imagine such a place. Describing the closest experiential and cultural equivalent in introducing the Holocaust to China may be the best way to improve reception.

4.4 Secondary Witness in a Personal Way

Sharon Deane-Cox suggests that the role of secondary witness imposes ethical demands on the translator of Holocaust testimony, and she warns against drawing self-referential parallels, writing “this appropriative motion cannot and should not persist in the translation of traumatic memory” (Reference Deane-Cox2013, 312). “Any assimilation of the Holocaust victim’s fractured selfhood to the translator’s own recognizable and coherent markers will necessarily lead to the annihilation of the witness” (Reference Deane-Cox2013, 313). Primo Levi also calls attention to this problematic self-referential tendency, but he observes that it is “all the more difficult to avoid as the distance in space and time increases” (Reference Levi1989, 165). This is surely the case for Gao as the Holocaust happened far from China and nearly sixty years passed between the end of World War II and his translation work. Nonetheless, to render a particular Holocaust experience in China, it may be imperative for the translator to draw on something within the experience and cultural framework of the recipients.

Contrary to the objection to the translator’s self-referential tendency, Gao uses his paratexts to assimilate the European Holocaust to the Chinese wartime experience. And while Deane-Cox insists that the translator “carry the ethical burden of guardianship” (Reference Deane-Cox2013, 321) to ensure the memory of survivors be accurately preserved and transmitted, Gao significantly alters the main texts of the testimonies according to his own standards of fluency and elegance, as analyzed in the previous section. In this respect, Gao takes his role as secondary witness in a highly personal way, attempting by radical means to make his witnessing as effective as possible.

There are actually scholars in Holocaust studies who promote a cosmopolitan idea of Holocaust memory, suggesting it can be expanded and lifted out of its European specificity, as long as “the uniqueness and exceptionalism attributed to its victim suffering for nationalist ends is abandoned and the field of memory is broadened to include other victims, other perpetrators and other bystanders involved in acts of mass violence and persecution” (Hirsch and Spitzer Reference Hirsch and Spitzer2009, 165). The Holocaust, as an atrocity against humanity, has the power to evoke collective memories worldwide and transcend ethnic and national borders. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider also demonstrate an open-mindedness in proposing that “the Holocaust does not become one totalizing signifier containing the same meaning for everyone. Rather its meanings evolve from the encounter of global interpretations and local sensibilities” (Levy and Sznaider Reference Levy and Sznaider2006, 11).

According to the research by Aaron Hass, at least one survivor, Ann Charnofsky, has emphasized that “people should remember not only my Holocaust, but other Holocausts” (Hass Reference Hass1995, 194). The Japanese atrocities are the Chinese Holocaust. Even if some Western scholars consider the Holocaust unimaginable, inexpressible, and thus incomparable, for Gao, the Japanese invasion of China and the war crimes committed are also beyond words or imagination, and similar to the Holocaust in their brutality.

This inclination to assimilate and domesticate is rooted in the human mind and cannot be eradicated in practice. Peter Davies suggests that translators, through their translations, “contribute to, intervene in, and comment on ideas about the Holocaust at the specific moment when an act of witnessing crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries” (Davies Reference Davies2018, 210). To understand and translate involves a hermeneutic process of procuring and appropriating. In this context, it becomes understandable that Gao presents a special perspective on the Holocaust which springs from the specific sociopolitical and historical circumstances of the recipient Chinese context.

5.1 The Triangle of Stance

Scholars in sociolinguistics have studied stance in naturally occurring speaking and writing. In the view of Robert Englebretson, there are five key conceptual principles of stance which he summarizes as: “stance is physical/personal/moral, stance is public and interpretable, stance is interactional, stance is indexical, and stance is consequential” (Englebretson Reference Englebretson and Englebretson2007, 11). First, stance consists in three overlapping levels: It is a physical act that involves body posture; it shows the attitude, belief, or evaluation of an individual person; and it is social morality that may involve moral judgment. The second principle holds that stance can be overtly inspected and interpreted in public. The third point refers to an inherent interactionality in stance, namely, stance as collaboratively constructed among many participants and relational to other stances. Fourth, stance calls up something beyond the textual and physical context and indexes the broader sociocultural background in which it occurs. Last but not least, stance has consequences and leads to a real final result for the stancetaker. Englebretson believes that academic perspectives regarding stance tend to focus on any number of these five principles to varying degrees.

A common premise of many researches on stance in discourse lies in its heterogeneity. It is commonly recognized that stancetaking is an interactional practice by conversational co-participants, rather than an isolated action. As Elise Kärkkäinen asserts, “stances only emerge as a result of joint engagement in the evaluative activity” (Reference Kärkkäinen2006, 712). And even if it looks like a personal stance, Alexandra Jaffe considers it “always achieved through comparison and contrast with other relevant persons and categories” (Reference Jaffe2009, 9). Participants in discourse do not evaluate an object in a vacuum; they do not merely act, they interact. Stance is a public action that is shaped by the voice and position of other stancetakers.

Taking this intersubjectivity into consideration, John W. Du Bois provides a basic structure for the representation of stance’s components and their relations with each other. He first contextualizes stance in three questions: the identity of the stancetaker, the object of stance, and the prior stance being responded to. Then, he forges a unified framework for analyzing the realization and interpretation of stance (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 Du Bois’s triangle of stance

In this triangle, a single overarching, unified act of stance is explained with reference to three different aspects: evaluation, positioning, and alignment. There are two social actors represented in the triangle – the first and second subjects (the speakers who are making an evaluative utterance) – as well as the shared stance object (the entity being evaluated in those utterances). Stancetaking consists in three subsidiary acts of evaluating, positioning, and aligning. When Subject 1 signals an attitude or assessment toward the object, they are at the same time positioning themselves relative to the object, and this behavior is related, directed, and compared to how Subject 2 evaluates the same object and situates themselves; alignment or disalignment can then be created from the similarity or difference of the two subjects’ evaluations of the same object. As Du Bois summarizes: “Concomitant to evaluating a shared stance object, stancetakers position themselves. Concomitant to positioning themselves, stancetakers define alignment with each other, whether the alignment is convergent or divergent” (Reference Bois, John and Englebretson2007, 164). The concept of alignment as Du Bois uses it is nuanced, not black-or-white. Stance can be aligned or disaligned by subtle degrees. It represents a point along a continuous scale, rather than a binary choice between a positive vs a negative pole.

With Du Bois’s stance triangle as a basis, Scott F. Kiesling and his colleagues have developed another model of stance. They modify one of the three aspects in Du Bois’s stance triangle – evaluation – by noting how much the subject is invested in his evaluation, and then adding investment as one of the important dimensions of stance. In their definition, investment is essentially the strength or “holistic determination” (Kiesling et al. Reference Kiesling, Pavalanathan, Fitzpatrick, Han and Eisenstein2018, 686) of an utterance, which can be manifested by the extent to which the subject is willing to defend his claims and how epistemically certain they are. Therefore, to Kiesling, stance is a complex construct that is captured through three dimensions: affect, investment, and alignment. Affect refers to the language user’s evaluation of the stance object, while investment denotes the degree to which that evaluation is felt. Alignment concerns how this user’s evaluation relates to those of other users in the same dialogue. In a later review article in explaining the same model, Kiesling uses the old term evaluation (as a synonym of affect) and states clearly that the term refers to “the evaluation and positioning as outlined by Du Bois” (Reference Kiesling2022, 420). Thus, the term affect that Kiesling et al. employ is the combination of Du Bois’s two dimensions, evaluation and positioning. Kiesling et al. also replace Du Bois’s stance object with another term “stance focus,” considering focus less reifying than object. Their new formulation can be seen in Figure 4 (and compared to Figure 3), though they did not draw their ideas into a triangle.

Figure 4 The stance triangle of Kiesling et al., adapted from Du Bois

To me, with their consideration of investment, Kiesling et al.’s new model presents a more comprehensive picture of the details of stancetaking than Du Bois’s stance triangle. Moreover, their choice of the term “affect” is more pertinent to the topic I am addressing in this study. The survivor’s affect plays a major role in Holocaust testimony as the personal and emotional bond between survivor and translator is often stressed. Thus, I will employ Kiesling’s modified triangle with the three key aspects, affect, investment, and alignment, rather than Du Bois’s evaluation, positioning, and alignment, to analyze Gao’s translations. However, the ideas of both are based on an important quality inherent in the process of stancetaking – intersubjectivity. They both note that stance arises from the dialogic interaction between interlocutors in a conversational sequential context, and needs to be researched from an intersubjective vantage point.

Kiesling et al. use their triangle of stance in analyzing conversation threads from online forums. In a 2022 article, Robert Neather borrows the model for his study of online conversation about Buddhist translations. He focuses on discussion threads that debate the merits of published Buddhist translations on one online Buddhist forum, Dharma Wheel, and in particular translations of the Lotus Sutra. He studies the dialogues of several posts discussing and evaluating translations to examine how particular claims about translations are advanced in interaction, and how differences between participants are modulated or managed. Although Neather borrows Kiesling et al.’s model for his translation research, he actually applies it to online translation comment dialogues, the kind of texts these theories are made to be used on, rather than on translation itself.

Can the triangle of stance be applied to translations? One may question the feasibility of such an application by saying that the theoretical constructs all seem to be centered on interactions, made, in other words, to explicate interpersonal conversations, thus not suitable for analyzing actual translations. In order to apply stancetaking theories to translation, it is necessary to see translation as fundamentally dialogic or interactive. I here draw on the widely influential thought of dialogism, a theory that Mikhail Bakhtin adopts for interpreting language and the world. He suggests that meanings are always co-constructed, and that there is an interactional nature in every concrete utterance. Hence, the triangle of stance is applicable not just to straightforward, obviously conversational texts, but to all writings, including translation.

5.2 Bakhtin and Dialogism

Dialogism, a lifelong focus of Bakhtin’s theoretical quest, lent itself readily to novels, which he viewed as primordially dialogical. Instead of treating a work as hermetic and self-sufficient, Bakhtin imagines it “a rejoinder in a given dialogue, whose style is determined by its interrelationship with other rejoinders in the same dialogue … ” (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Holquist1996, 274) And the living utterances “arise out of this dialogue as a continuation of it and as a rejoinder to it … ” (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Holquist1996, 276–277) Novels, in his view, embody a dynamic interplay and interruption of different perspectives represented by various characters. Their distinct voices speak for themselves in their own reality, subverting the author’s monopoly of the text.

To Bakhtin, dialogism is essential not only in literary texts but in language generally. Dialogue is a pervasive force in language, because a single consciousness is always addressing an intense relationship with others and there is always a “dialogic orientation of a word among other words (of all kinds and degrees of otherness)” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Holquist1996, 275). “Language … lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Holquist1996, 293). Bakhtin even deconstructs the concept of monologue, considering it an illusory, relative construct necessarily made to understand dialogue. If it shows physically as a monologue, it is essentially a dialogue. Within this mindset, thoughts can be deemed inner dialogue, so there are already dialogues existing in the speaking subject’s mental event before an utterance is possible.

Bakhtin insists that verbal discourse has a social soul, and is not self-contained. The use of language is mediated by social ways of seeing, which always illuminate some aspects of an object and obscures others, and which are always challenged and changed in dialogues (Robinson Reference Robinson2011). Bakhtin finds the speaking subject never an isolated entity:

Language is the medium ground of individual and group relations, and it is the dialogicality of language that absorbs individuals into groups while enabling them to remain themselves (Holquist Reference Holquist1990, 57). Utterances are achieved under preexisting restraints, being conditioned by prior utterances, particular group practices and social norms. Every utterance is made as a response to something and may expect responses in turn, and they are constantly in conversation with each other. Therefore, the authentic environment in which an utterance lives and takes shape is dialogized heteroglossia. A person is always in dialogue with something in the world. Their verbal discourse has to relate to the extraverbal situation that engenders it.

Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism endows every verbal utterance with a quality of interactivity, and lays the theoretical foundation for viewing translation from an intersubjective perspective. A translated text can be a dialogical whole. The translator may convey evaluations explicitly or implicitly in response to the evaluations made by other subjects, thus making the translated text an intense, complicated arena with various forces of different discourse co-participants. Translation embodies multiple voices and conveys meanings beyond the literal words on the page. Some scholars of translation studies have pointed out the multiple, even mutually contradictory, voices in translation, which are actually forms of stance-taking. Theo Hermans focuses on the translators’ position, a concept similar to stance, and proposes that “all translating can be seen to have the translator’s subject position inscribed in it” (Hermans Reference Hermans2014a, 286). “The translator both speaks for the original author and signals reservations” (Hermans Reference Hermans2014b, 65). By drawing on Relevance Theory, Hermans views translation as an instance of “echoic speech,” suggesting that the translator may indicate an opinion regarding his translation which can be empathetic and supportive, or skeptical and dissociative. And in the latter case, the echoic speech becomes an ironic speech, meaning that the translator is implying a distancing and disapproving attitude. When translators voice their attitudes, they are taking a stance in the translation activity.

5.3 Gao’s Stance in a Triangle Model

Kiesling et al.’s triangle of stance can be used to examine Gao’s stance-taking when he intervenes into the original texts and inserts additions of his own devising. Specifically, I will analyze Gao’s affects toward the suffering of the Jews under Nazi rule, the authors’ family life, and the misconduct of Russian soldiers, and note the intensity of those affects and how they align or disalign with the affects toward the same object held by the authors and the Chinese publisher. My objective is to explore how Gao mediates his affects and positions himself in relation to the authors and the publisher.

5.3.1 Jewish Victims’ Suffering

In writing their stories, both Max Stern and Olga Horak describe the hardships they endured under Nazi rule, including the pain of wandering about in desperation under endless apprehension, the horror of witnessing innumerable murders, long struggles with nightmares, and nervous breakdowns. Comparison of the original text with its translation reveals Gao’s inclination to intensify the authors’ description of these sufferings.

One example is Stern’s description of his worst camp experience in Sachsenhausen. He narrates how, upon arrival, the prisoners were shaved, numbered, and told to assemble for inspection, and how a priest was shot by a commandant right on the spot. Stern’s narration is flat, without color or emotion. Gao appears to think it would not sufficiently attract reader’s attention, so he added the following remarks to Stern’s narration:

这里只有屠杀和血腥, 没有人性, 没有尊严。那些持枪的人都是野兽, 可以不眨眼地屠杀一位母亲、儿童和老人。

[There was nothing but carnage and bloodshed, no humanity, no dignity. The men with guns were monsters who could kill a mother, child, or elderly person without blinking an eye.]

(Stern Reference Stern2004, 48)

This addition gives a more direct insight into the horror of the concentration camps. It was quoted by the journalist Yuan Xi in the news report reviewing the book in People’s Daily on January 9, 2005. Yuan may not have known it stemmed from Gao, instead of the author’s original text, but he clearly considered these words precise and effective to introduce the situation of the Nazi camp to the Chinese audience.

Another example concerns Olga Horak’s experience at Kurzbach, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Germany. In late 1944, Horak and her mother were transported from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Kurzbach, where they spent the harsh winter of 1944–1945. She describes the life there, including the prisoners’ housing in a barn with bunks, the camp’s exposed latrines, the endless roll calls, prisoners’ slave labor in the forest, and other daily routines. There were two female SS guards, who acted no less viciously than their male colleagues. They carried canes for beating the prisoners whenever they wanted:

Original:

They were dressed in the uniform of the female SS, a field grey outfit with a heavy warm cape and the ever-present cane for striking prisoners.

(Horak Reference Horak2000, 53)

Translation:

她们穿着女式的党卫军军服, 一件灰色的带有斗篷的衣服, 手里拿着棍棒, 不时地毒打囚犯。很多囚犯被毒打得急剧地抽搐, 无力尖叫, 只能痛苦地呻吟。听到她们的嚎叫, 许多囚犯不由自主地哆嗦起来。

[They were dressed in the uniform of the female SS, a grey outfit with cape, and held canes in their hands striking prisoners savagely every now and then. Many of the prisoners were so badly beaten that they twitched severely, unable to scream, and could only moan in pain. Hearing their howls, many of the prisoners shivered involuntarily.]

(Horak Reference Horak2010, 60)

To the original’s mere statement of the act of beating, Gao supplies the image of prisoners desperately struggling under violent physical assaults, as it is underlined. Through picturing this, the target readers will more deeply feel the terror and despair of the Jewish prisoners. Such additions indicate the stance Gao takes regarding the Jewish victims’ suffering, which is clear when I present it in the form of a triangle. As a person with a sense of justice and compassion, Gao closely accords with his authors, but he amplifies the original narratives by increasing their intensity and volume, thus investing more heavily in portraying the suffering of Jewish victims. Figure 5 shows his relation with the authors in evaluating their and their fellow prisoners’ suffering.

Figure 5 The translator’s stance vis-à-vis Jewish victim’s suffering

When translating trauma, Gao attains emotional resonance through visualizing the original words. He has so immersed himself into the camp world that he cannot help but weave some of his own thoughts and imagination into the narrative. His personal connection with his good friend Stern and with Horak naturally makes him keen to bear witness for them. Thinking himself sharing their feelings, he is eager to speak out for the friends he treasures, and is determined to amplify the voices of the weak and defend the oppressed against Nazi injustice, from a position of righteous indignation.

5.3.2 The Authors’ Family Life

Gao also makes evaluative utterances on the authors’ family life by altering and enriching the originals. A radical example concerns a minor conflict between the teenage Horak and her mother. In 1942–1943, Horak’s family was hiding in Hungary. As the adults were struggling with anxiety in the face of imminent danger, tempers briefly flared. The underlined is where Gao’s translation differs from the original:

Original:

… one day my mother was very upset, and I was the one who copped it.

(Horak Reference Horak2000, 18)

Translation:

有一天, 母亲十分不高兴, 是我惹的祸。

[One day, my mother was very upset, and I was the one who caused the problem.]

(Horak Reference Horak2010, 23)

When Horak writes “copped,” she means her mother was venting her anger, unfairly, on her daughter. But Gao lays the blame on Horak, criticizing her for causing her mother’s upset. When Horak talks back to her mother, the mother overreacts and hits her. The original text ends the episode by saying that Horak never forgot being hit by her mother on that occasion, and that she felt deeply hurt and refused to talk to anybody for days. But Gao was clearly not happy with it. He made the following additions to the original:

于是我终于向母亲道出了心思 , 请求母亲原谅。令我欣慰的是, 她的反应非常平静。“我的孩子, ”她对我说, “妈妈早忘了。”母亲的这番话使我如释重负。从那以后, 我们母女俩的心贴得更近了。

[I finally told my mother what was in my mind and asked for her forgiveness. To my relief, her reaction was very calm. “My child,” she said to me, “I’ve already forgotten about it.” Mother’s words freed me from a grievous burden. Since then, our hearts have been closer.]

(Horak Reference Horak2010, 23)

Gao adds this because the original ending does not conform to the key Chinese philosophical concept of “filial piety,” or xiao, so cherished in Chinese society. “Filial piety” is a Confucian virtue which advocates the child’s obedience, respect, duty, and caring for the parents. James St. André has traced the historical development of the English term filial piety and its conflation with xiao, suggesting that this attribute has a long tradition in China and today is seen as mainly specific to China (Reference André2018, 310). In accordance with this virtue, Gao made Horak examine herself and apologize to her mother, because a properly pious girl is more likely to leave a favorable impression on the target readers compared to a heartless child who bears grudges against her parent.

The passage reveals a tension of evaluative attitudes toward parent–child relations between the translator and the author, which can be shown in Figure 6. The tone in which Horak talks about the conflict is quite realistic. She feels aggrieved at being wronged by her mother and registers a bitter complaint about her mother’s overreaction. Her investment does not receive any particular emphasis but Gao intensifies this investment by altering and adding to the original text, making Horak admit to “her” mistake and ask for forgiveness. In drawing on the conventional Chinese virtue of filial piety and reframing the scene, Gao is, to an extent, disaligning himself with his author. As he imbues the scene with values absent in (though not necessarily incompatible with) the original, he takes a certain divergent stance relative to that of the author.

Figure 6 The translator’s stance vis-à-vis parent–child relation

In order to enhance the target readers’ acceptance of the author’s life story, Gao elaborates various scenes, creating a well-rounded picture in line with his own vision of how, in an ideal world, family relations might develop. In the opening paragraph of Auschwitz to Australia, while Horak simply introduces her home city and family members, Gao added numerous details to render it a harmonious environment with exemplary parenting. When translating Max Stern’s book, Gao gives an idealistic touch to the love relationship between Stern and his wife Eva, and emphasizes Stern’s marital loyalty.

By idealizing the family life depicted in the originals into a morality model, Gao is appealing to the values he shares with the target society. The concept of family in Chinese culture expresses the idea of collective harmony and is deeply rooted in the Chinese social order. The traditional family mindset is “an integrated part of the Chinese welfare ideology” (Hämäläinen et al. Reference Hämäläinen, Chen and Zhao2017, 234). Individuals, with clear and determined roles within the family, contribute to a harmonious social life. In this light, Gao adapted the authors’ families to the way of Chinese welfare thinking, playing to stereotypical social expectations in the target context.

5.3.3 Russian Soldiers’ Misdeeds

Both Stern and Horak describe in their books how, toward the end of the war, when the Soviet Red Army entered Germany, robberies and rape of German women were regular occurrences. However, this information is carefully changed or removed in Gao’s translations. In May 1945, Stern and other prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were liberated during their death march. Shortly after they were treated in a Russian field hospital, they set out on their journey home. When they reached Spandau, the main headquarters of the Russian army in Germany, they saw two Russian soldiers standing at the entrance with machine guns. This is what happened:

Original:

A German woman came up to them and complained she had been raped. One soldier replied in Yiddish: “What should I do? Go home, go home.” (Stern Reference Stern2003, 68)

Translation:

一个德国妇女走上前, 向他们投诉, 一个士兵用依地语回答: “我没有办法, 回家吧, 回家吧。”

[A German woman came up to them and complained. A soldier replied in Yiddish: “I can do nothing. Go home, go home.”] (Stern Reference Stern2004, 58)

The translation differs from the original text in two places, where underlined. The woman’s specific complaint – the rape – is omitted, in favor of the Russian image. Furthermore, in the original, the soldier answers the woman with a rhetorical question “What should I do?” implying his indifference and coldness, which is changed into a less negative, declarative “I can do nothing.” An odd detail is that the soldier answers in Yiddish, a language spoken by Jews in Eastern Europe, including in parts of Russia. He therefore must have been Jewish and understood what the woman said in German. In a similar case, when Stern mentions that shortly after the war, civilians traveling on trains were frequently robbed by Russian soldiers, the translation refrains from mentioning that it was the Russians who committed these robberies.

In the translation of Olga Horak’s book, we find a more radical move to avoid casting the Russians in a negative light. The example concerns the “short walk” a Russian officer took with Horak’s friend Bozena. After liberation from the camps, Horak was sent to a hospital where she met another young female patient called Bozena; they quickly became very good friends. One day, as they were sitting in a park, a Russian officer stopped to talk with Bozena. To their surprise, the officer wore ten watches on his arm, and Bozena boldly asked him to give her one of his watches. The officer said yes but what he asked in return seems to make Gao uncomfortable and the story is changed:

Original:

“Yes,” he said, “Charasho—why not. But come with me for a short walk first.” Bozena left the park bench and went for the “short walk” with the Russian officer. I had no idea where they went, but when she returned an hour later, she showed me a beautiful gold bracelet watch which the Russian had given her. No questions were asked. (Horak Reference Horak2000, 92)

Translation:

“好”, 军官说, “没问题, 为什么不可以呢?但你要先陪我出去见我一个朋友。我在和他打赌, 赌在一个小时内就能找到一位女朋友, 你就装扮成我的女友。”波兹娜爽快地从长椅上站了起来, 陪苏军军官去见他的朋友。我也不知道他们去了哪里, 功夫不大她就回来了。她让我看了苏军军官给她的一块漂亮的金表, 那是她假扮军官女友得到的礼物。

[“Yes”, said the officer, “why not? But first you have to go out with me to meet a friend of mine. I’m making a bet with him that I’ll find a girlfriend within an hour and you’ll pretend to be my girlfriend.” Bozena got up from the bench readily and accompanied the Russian officer to meet his friend. I had no idea where they went, but she came back after a short time. She showed me a beautiful gold watch that the Soviet officer had given her, as a gift for acting as his girlfriend.]

(Horak Reference Horak2010, 100)

Clearly, Bozena had sex with the Russian officer to obtain that watch. But the translation offers an altogether more innocent, light-hearted story that depicts the Russian as friendly and generous. What is behind such changes? Commenting on the translation of The Max Factor (accessed on September 10, 2022), Gao said he once approached Stern to check the incidents involving Russian misconduct. Stern assured him that the robberies and rapes were accurately depicted. Gao himself had a bit of relevant experience as well: When living in north-eastern China in his early years, he was often told by older residents that when the Soviet Red Army marched into Manchuria to destroy the Japanese Kwantung Army,Footnote ¹³ robberies and rapes were common in their land. One might then have expected him to adhere to the truth and maintain the relevant passages fully intact in his translation. However, he suggested that he was challenged by the Chinese publisher, who exerted strong pressure on him to downplay this content, stating that the translation could not be published otherwise.

Gao’s claim can’t be verified. But I do not have reason to doubt his words. It seems that the publisher may well have imposed such a pressure in the political context of China–Russia relations at that time.

After the end of the Cold War, China and Russia established various bilateral and multilateral cooperation mechanisms out of a common desire to offset the hegemonic position of the United States and create a multipolar international system. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the two countries intensified their good relationship, developed close ties with each other, and became increasingly united by largely convergent views of international issues. In April 1996, China and Russia established the Shanghai Five (a group of five countries: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan), which upgraded to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in June 2001 with deeper political and economic connections. In July of the same year, the two sides signed the Treaty on Good Neighborliness, Friendship, and Cooperation; China has no such friendship treaty with any other country (Bekkevold Reference Bekkevold, Kirchberger, Sinjen and Wörmer2022, 47). The two forged a “strategic partnership” and resolved that their friendship “would pass down for all generations” (Wilson Reference Wilson2004, 3). When Russian President Vladimir Putin visited China in October 2004 and signed an agreement to resolve decades-long border disputes, the strategic trust between the two sides further deepened.

China and Russia’s societal links also grew significantly from the mid-2000s (Li and Poh Reference Mingjiang, Poh, Bekkevold and Lo2019, 28). The Sino-Russian People-to-People Cooperation Council organized various social events to increase cultural exchanges between the two countries. For example, 2006 was “the Year of Russia” in China and 2007 “the Year of China” in Russia; “the Chinese Language Year” and “the Russian Language Year” were also held in 2009–2010. In other words, the very years Gao was working on the translations and pursuing their publication saw a rapid consolidation of Sino-Russian partnership. In this process, China was active in initiating and pursuing the partnership, and the Chinese leadership often showing a highly solicitous attitude in seeking good relations with Russia. The Posts and Telecom Press, as a state-owned publishing enterprise, obviously followed the course set by the government. This correlates with their unwillingness to publish material containing negative depictions of the Russian.

The examples display Gao’s evaluative attitudes in a complicated tension. In the stance triangle shown as Figure 7, I add colors to the different properties of attitudes. Both Stern and Horak hold negative affect (red) toward Russian misdeeds, with definite, high investment. But the publisher holds a positive affect (green) toward them and puts strong pressure on the translator. The translator personally feels inclined to stand with the authors (green) and disagrees with the publisher (red), but in an attempt to align himself with the publisher’s politics, he feels obliged to reduce the investment in truthfully reporting Russian misdeeds and avoid showing a negative affect toward them. The mixture of different colors shows the dilemma the translator faced. Gao is squeezed in the middle of a tension: He wants to witness for the authors, but he is also under pressure from the publisher.

Figure 7 The translator’s stance vis-à-vis Russian misdeeds

Kiesling et al.’s triangle model, though originally used to analyze the stance of speakers in conversational exchange, proves equally useful in discerning the translator’s positioning relative to that of other participants in translated texts. Gao performs an affective intervention into the original texts, whether from his own volition or under pressure from the publisher. He intensifies the description of the Jewish victims’ suffering out of eagerness to witness for his survivor friends; he projects stereotypical Chinese social expectations on the authors’ family life to create scenes familiar to prospective readers; and he redescribes the misdeeds by some Russian soldiers with a light touch so as to form a reluctant alignment with his publisher in a Russia-friendly political environment. This brings up what we see in the finished translations: stronger accusations of the Nazis’ atrocities, idealized love among family members, and deliberate obliteration of the Russian soldiers’ crimes due to politically motivated lenience.