Strangers in Their Hometown: Linguistic Alienation and Cultural Translation in Chinese Diasporic Women’s Writing

Abstract

In the wave of globalization, scattered writing has become an important way for cross-cultural dissemination of Chinese literature. Chinese female scattered authors with dual gender and cultural identities often face unique language and cultural challenges in their creations. This article takes the works of writers such as Yan Geling, Tang Tingting, and Celeste Ng as case studies, based on Homi Baba's "Third Space" theory and combined with Ng ũ g ĩ wa Thiong'o's core discourse on colonial language oppression, to clarify the dual problem of "language alienation" as the weakening of meaning in the mother tongue and the lack of cultural foundation in the second language. It clarifies that "cultural translation" is a creative practice of symbol reconstruction and narrative adjustment, and then focuses on the interactive relationship between the two to explore the process of Chinese female refugees coping with language fragmentation and cultural dislocation in cross contexts, completing cultural meaning transformation and identity dynamic reconstruction through writing. Research has found that language estrangement is not only reflected in the "lack of meaning in words" at the expression level, but also leads to uncertainty in identity cognition. Cultural translation can build a dialogue bridge between different cultures through the concretization of cultural symbols and the adjustment of narrative methods. This type of writing can not only alleviate the anxiety caused by language estrangement, provide fresh text samples for Chinese culture to go global, but also provide a new perspective for understanding the reconstruction of dispersed female identity.