Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s initial article ‘Notes on Metamodernism’ has now been translated into Mandarin by Chen Houliang. It has been published in the Journal Foreign Theoretical Trends, no 11 (2012). You can download the article here.
1 thought on “Chinese Translation Notes on Metamodernism”
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This journal has done metamodernism a disservice: its Chinese translation of metamodernism as “yuan modernism”, is very misleading. Yuan (元) in Chinese has strong and clear connotations, meaning “first”, “beginning”, number one”, “essence” and “major”.
The mistaken translation may have come from the fact that “metalanguage” has convenionally been translated into Chinese as “yuan language”.
Meta-fiction, though, is mostly translated as “hou she fiction” (post-set fiction). Calling metamodernism “hou she modernism” is vague but less misleading than “yuan modernism”, though unfortunately the appearance of the word “hou” (post) may be confusing when juxtaposed with “hou modernism” (postmodernism).
Maybe “yao bai modernism” or “yao dang modernism” (oscilatting moderism) is a slightly better choice.
Chan Koonchung, Beijing