Translating China for the Gazing Eyes—A Case Study of the Battle at Lake Changjin

Despite Sino-West conflicts have inflicted grief and melancholy to the extent that China’s modern history is entitled as the history of Shame (Zhang in Shishang Xiandai Xing 时尚现代性 [The Modernity Fashion]. 生活·读书·新知三联书店. SDX Joint Publishing House, Beijing, 2016), China’s major political events have always been conducted with its relations with the West, with a primary objective to be viewed on an equal level by the Western world (Chow in Primitive passions: visuality, sexuality, ethnography, and contemporary Chinese cinema. Columbia University Press, New York, 1995). Stimulated by the experience of grief in the Sino-western communication, as reflected in the case of film, nationalistic cultural translation is deliberately made to represent a “strong China”, with its strength constructed by Western audio-visual spectacles. In this regard, a multileveled system of intersemiotic translation models is proposed. The system comprises the level of culture and media. Each model of the system represents a lens through which a culture is “looked at”, demonstrating how the intersemiotic translators, by employing those lenses, expect how a culture is to be gazed at. This chapter interrogates the case of the Chinese blockbuster war film The Battle at Lake Changjin. As the highest grossing film in the history of Chinese cinema to date, the film translates China through audio-visualizing its painful and yet glorious conflict with the West (the US). The film presents a conglomeration of Occidentalist stereotypes of the West, presenting a “strong China” for the domestic Chinese patriotic audiences, through exaggerated Hollywood visual stereotypes. Using the proposed system as the underpinning methodology, based on interview data and visual analysis, this chapter analyses the film as a syndrome of cultural translation in present-day China. This is done through employing Western lenses and spectacles to translate China’s triumphant success over the West. This chapter offers insights into the ongoing audio-visual and stereotypical turn of cultural translation in the highly politicized and ironically more ethnographical world.