Translating Chinese Martial Arts for a Global Audience: A Multimodal Perspective

As an integral part of Chinese culture, Chinese martial arts embody an organic universe composed of tactics, outlooks, values, and practices. Due to this, the martial arts are foreign to Westerners at large. To share the arts with the international world, translation is obviously very useful. However, since Chinese martial arts have been most readily known by others through real performance and fighting competition, text alone cannot adequately express the embodied cultural universe. For this reason, this chapter attempts a multimodal approach to the translation of Chinese martial arts for a global audience. It holds that the audiovisual translation of kung fu films has shaped Chinese martial arts as a series of powerful fighting tactics, and the notion of “justice” attached to the arts has also been conveyed. The translation of wuxia novels, also featuring multimodality, has brought out traditional philosophies exemplified by Chinese martial arts. In addition, Chinese overseas, as cultural translators over the past century, have also facilitated the cross-cultural communication regarding Chinese martial arts. It is through the reciprocity of kung fu films and wuxia novels, as well as the mediating role-play by Chinese overseas, that Chinese martial arts have been effectively shared with the world.