Translation as Cultural Mediation: The Making of the Chinese Edition of Bulgari’s Catalogue

This paper illustrates some of the major issues arising from dealing with a translation specifically intended to transmit to Chinese readers huge amounts of information of various kinds originating in Western culture. As a case study, Bulgari’s catalogue is an extremely specialised text, which makes use of the micro-language of jewellery and gold-craft and contains a number of linguistic loans from the French, as well as lots of terms whose origins are to be traced back to specific fields of art and craftsmanship, both in an- cient Greece and Rome and in the culture which developed and flourished in Italy and Europe in general during the Renaissance period and later. The text is also scattered with names of pagan gods, emperors, characters from the Greek and Roman mythologies, movie stars and people from the film in- dustry and the jet-set of both the past and the present, most of whom the Chinese reader is not likely to be familiar with. Moreover it presents a great number of cultural references, such as the different titles of the European nobility, which rarely, if ever, are equivalent to those of the ancient Chinese aristocracy. Apart from detailing some of the challenges involved, this short essay aims at pointing out the importance of team work in carrying out the translation of a huge, complex and extremely specialised project such as an exhibition catalogue in a rather short time.