When Chinese Martial Artists Meet Western Heroes: A Stylometric Comparison of Translated Wuxia Fiction and Western Heroic Literature

This study used stylometric analyses to examine the ways that English translations of Chinese Wuxia fiction and Western heroic literature published in modern English are stylistically similar and different. We wish to contribute tostylometric studies and Wuxia translation research by introducing the stylistic panorama, a concept that describes the stylistic picture of a (translated) text in a relatively comprehensive and functional way through a set of stylistic indices. We also highlight stylistic similarities and differences between heroic literature in the East and that in the West, providing a potential connection that enhances our understanding of the current reception of translated Wuxia fiction. We examined six published English translations of Wuxia novels and 12 representative chivalric stories and heroic fantasies in modern English and found that the stylistic panoramas of the Wuxia translations differed from those of the two Western subgenres. We investigated possible translatorial and extra-translatorial factors, such as translators’ motivations and the year of publication, to explain those findings. We hope that this research will broaden the understanding of the current reception of translated Chinese Wuxia stories in the English-speaking world and will encourage new applications for the concept of stylistic panorama in stylometric studies.