Cross-Ethnic Translation and Historiography: The Instances of Li Ang's "Rouged Sacrifice" and Lai Hsiang-yin's "The Translator"

In light of Naoki Sakai's theorizing of translation as liminality and Chaoyang Liao's theorizing of the ethics of translation, this paper looks into the power relationship between the culturally and politically powerful ethnic group and minorities as well as the translation of the historical experiences of ethnic minorities, especially minority women and homosexuals, in Taiwan. In Taiwan's mandarin culture under the colonial rule of Kuomintang, for ethnic minorities to write in mandarin about their historical experiences that had hitherto been officially suppressed and erased always entails cross-ethnic translation and historiography. How to translate their experiences in order for the mainlanders to empathize with rather than misunderstand them? How can minority women and homosexuals represent and translate their experiences? This paper uses the instances of Li Ang's novella “Tsai-chuang Hsieh-chi” (Rouged Sacrifice) and Lai Hsiang-yin's novella “Fan-yi Che” (The Translator) to analyze the issues involved in cross-ethnic translation and historiography. The two novellas, one dealing with the 2-2-8 massacre and the White Terror, the other the rise of the Opposition in the 1970s and 1980s, tackle the self-representation of ethnic minorities, particularly minority women and homosexuals, as well as the tension between translatability and untranslatability.