Translation and Cultural Mediation: Repositioning Claire McFall's Ferryman for the Chinese Market

Claire McFall’s trilogy, Ferryman, Trespassers and Outcasts is widely acclaimed, but nowhere is it so popular as in China. The Chinese translation of McFall’s debut novel, Ferryman, was published in 2015, and since then the trilogy has been sold over five million copies in China. The development of McFall’s subsequent career owes much to the popularity of her work in China, which has secured her international reputation. Drawing upon interviews with Claire McFall and Caroline Gao Hui, the commissioning editor of Ferryman in China, and Fu Qiang, the translator for the first two books into Chinese and focusing on both the source texts and their translations, this paper explores the process of cultural mediation that transformed a Scottish Young Adult (YA) novel into a member of a recognised Chinese genre that deals with the ‘healing of souls’. The first volume’s narrative of a Scottish heroine’s fantastic and romantic journey through the afterlife has parallels in Chinese culture; these parallels invite a reframing of a YA narrative within the ‘soul-healing’ genre. While the translations efface certain details specific to Scottish culture, the original sequels add elements that allow the novels and their translations to be positioned as Scottish/Chinese texts. To the Scotland-based narratives, McFall adds two minor Chinese characters, an old, dying lady, Xing You Yu, and her granddaughter, Lian, and in the metatexts she addresses her Chinese readers directly. The case of the Ferryman trilogy illustrates the dynamic ways in which translation mediates popular fiction and repositions it across different genres in different cultures. In short, the paper considers the intertwined, transnational, intercultural nature of literary creation and translation in the contemporary popular book market.