Decoding and Recoding Signs and Images in the Wenxin Diaolong: from Title to Titles

The linguistic and cultural challenge that the translators of Liu Xie’s masterpiece courageously accepted can be immediately perceivable within the Wenxin diaolong chapters title, through which different approaches to translation – such as de-codification and re-codification of signs and images – come to existence. This contribution is meant to be a preliminary comparative study on the strategies adopted for the translation of the Wenxin diaolong chapter titles. First, a table of the original titles, followed by several translations into three European and alphabetic languages – namely Italian, English and French – has been created. The table, presented hereunder, allows for a multi-perspective comparison, articulated into an unbiased discourse that takes into consideration the unavoidable shift in the architecture of the titles, as well as the semantic patterning and the lexical choices.