Translation Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrs20

Feeling foreign: A trust-based compromise model

of translation reception

Bei Hu

To cite this article: Bei Hu (2022) Feeling foreign: A trust-based compromise model of
translation reception, Translation Studies, 15:2, 202-220, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2022.2032306

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2022.2032306

Published online: 16 Feb 2022.

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TRANSLATION STUDIES
2022, VOL. 15, NO. 2, 202–220
https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2022.2032306

Feeling foreign: A trust-based compromise model of

translation reception
Bei Hu
Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Contributions to translation reception often examine the readers’ Reception studies; translator
responses to binary translation solutions (e.g. foreignisation and intervention; Chinese
domestication). Scant attention has been paid to the ethical translated foreign affairs
discourse; trust; a
causes of readers’ acceptance of translated foreignness. This
compromise model;
quasi-experimental study attempts to illustrate how a translation ethics
heterogeneous readership engages with varying degrees of
translator intervention to handle foreignness. It offers insights
into the ways in which trust relates to translation reception.
Empirical evidence indicates that what readers tend to accept is
not any deterministic, textual solution but rather a set of options
that are deemed ethically trusted. Readers might refuse a norm-
conforming, fluent translation because they feel manipulated. On
the other hand, a literal translation of foreign elements may be
accepted if the text is regarded as “authentic” or as “objective”.
This article conceptualises translation reception using a trust-
based compromise model, in which readers calculate losses and
gains within mediated, intercultural communication.

Introduction
Dealing with foreignness is a major challenge for translators. Translation solutions can be
seen as a set of textual interventions that translators use to accommodate cultural differ-
ences. Translation reception may primarily depend on how the readers “tolerate” the
translated foreignness in a text (Lathey 2011, 211).
A rather simplified dualism of translation solutions (e.g. foreignising versus domesti-
cating) designed to manage cultural distance has been a staple in the literature on trans-
lation solutions, with scholars sometimes definitely favouring one extreme or the other
(e.g. Venuti 2012; Berman 1992; Nida and Taber 1969; Newmark 1988). Several empirical
studies of translation reception have examined how participants respond to texts pro-
duced using binary models, notably in literary translation (e.g. Stegeman 1991; Kruger
(Kotze) 2012) and audio-visual translation (e.g. Di Giovanni and Gambier 2018; Tuomi-
nen 2019). However, some doubts remain about the indeterminacy of translation recep-
tion: how much foreignness could be retained and still be accepted by readers? In
addition, the oversimplified dichotomy suggests – albeit implicitly – that target readers
are treated as an abstract, idealised, homogenous group (cf. Mossop 1990) which will

CONTACT Bei Hu chsbei@nus.edu.sg

© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 203

always respond to a particular translation in a “predictable” and “monolithic” way

(Robinson 1997, 110). This suggestion, in turn, raises the perennial concern that
readers’ perceptions of translation solutions might largely be based on scholars’ own
“experience and imagination” (Chesterman 1998, 226).
To explore how foreign elements are received in high-stakes communication, rather
than generalising translation reception in general, I present a quasi-experimental study
of Australian readers’ responses to various levels of translator intervention in translated
Chinese foreign affairs discourse. Translator intervention is used as an analytical tool to
explore a variety of ways to handle cultural differences. As a controllable, non-binary
variable, translator intervention – which is measurable in degrees – denotes a wide
range of ways to translate, from literalism (i.e. low-level intervention) to radical adap-
tation (i.e. high-level intervention). This variable is partly inspired by Andrew Chester-
man’s (Chesterman 2016, 88; 2005) proposal for “global strategies”, which looks beyond
solutions to particular linguistic features and involves a spectrum of choices between
word-for-word translation and radical rewriting. In this sense, the level of translator
intervention is relative and contingent on comparison.
In asking what underlying factors might affect the reception of translated foreignness,
this article will address the following three research questions:

(1) To what extent does foreignness affect readers’ acceptance of a translation?

(2) What factors may affect readers’ perceptions of a translated foreign element?
(3) If there are multiple factors that affect translation acceptance, what determines
readers’ hierarchical decision-making?

Before I proceed to the description of the research design and the quantitative and
qualitative analyses of the study, a brief review of the influence of translation solutions’
binary oppositions on the previous empirically oriented reception studies is in order. In
the following section, I will introduce an ethical dimension to translation reception, situ-
ating trust in relation to translator intervention.

Previous reception studies: A fallacy of homogeneous effects

The dichotomy suggesting that a text should be translated one way or the other has
loomed large throughout reception studies. This suggestion aligns with the traditional
binarism of translation solutions in Western translation thinking (e.g. Cicero 1996;
Schleiermacher 2012). Two often-mentioned proposals in modern translation studies
are those of Venuti 2012, 1998 and Berman 1992, who believe that domesticating the
marks of foreignness and assimilating an original text to a target culture leads to unethi-
cal, ethnocentric translation. A more ethical translation should retain foreign elements to
help readers receive others as others. The underlying assumption is that the classical
dichotomies of translation strategies will heavily affect, if not determine, the target
reader’s perception of foreign cultures. In her analysis of the Commission of the Euro-
pean Union’s institutional translation, Koskinen (2000, 61) makes a similar comparison
between the communicative effect of domestication and foreignisation, arguing that
excessive domestication may lead to a “rather comical foreignising effect” and therefore
damage the institution’s key political goal of transparent communication. Nevertheless,
204 B. HU

some counter-evidence supports the argument that linguistic norm-conformance can

guarantee the best communicative effect – even in the context of institutional translation.
Indeed, from a functionalist perspective, Mossop (1990, 342) proposes that, in insti-
tutional settings, “idiomatic” translation that removes all traces of the source text’s orig-
inal voice should be rejected. Based on his observation of the Government of Canada’s
institutional translation practices, Mossop argues that in this context idiomaticity is
undesirable because it conceals the original text’s otherness and risks erasing the
source-text author’s national identity. Making the premier of Quebec sound like an
English-speaking politician is suspicious. In the eyes of readers, “translated quotations
should sometimes sound odd” (Mossop 1990, 344).
Readers’ preferences for translation solutions are far from universal, further compli-
cating the picture of translation reception. Some empirical results suggest that how a
text is translated hardly affects readers’ reception (Kruger (Kotze) and Kruger 2017).
An earlier example is Jelle Stegeman’s study (1991) (as cited in Hermans 2014, 22),
which indicates no significant difference between readers’ receptions of Multatuli’s
Max Havelaar source text and its translations. Zhong’s (2014) more recent study expli-
citly states that foreignisation and domestication strategies rarely affect readers’ reception
of the two Chinese translations of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind.
Methodology offers one explanation for these findings; translations tend to be broadly
dichotomised in a top-down, prescriptive manner. Zhong (2014) does not convincingly
explain why the two translated texts of Gone with the Wind should be categorised as a
“foreignisation” and a “domestication”, apart from citing one previous descriptive
study (Wen and Xiaoying 2003) that says so. The “hybrid” nature of translations
(Kruger (Kotze) 2013, 189) – which results in the domestication of some items and
not others – may explain the similarity in readers’ receptions.
The question of whether translation’s linguistic profile necessarily determines accep-
tance also remains open to discussion. Some empirical studies find that information
density may hardly affect readers’ judgements. In their experiment, Alexander Künzli
and Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow (2011) found no significant difference in terms of
readers’ understanding between standard subtitles and innovative subtitles with more
information. Orrego-Carmona (2016) compared Fifty Five participants’ reception of sub-
titled TV series and found – perhaps counter-intuitively – that lower-quality, non-pro-
fessional subtitles did not negatively affect audience reception.
A few recent reception studies have, thus, shifted the research focus from translation’s
textual features to the roles and reading patterns of translation readers. In what Chester-
man (1998, 221) termed the “fallacy of homogenous effect”, a given translation is
assumed to exert the same effect on all receivers. Regarding the mental image of trans-
lation users, Suojanen, Koskinen, and Tuominen (2015, 61) argue that actual readers
always “constitute a more or less heterogeneous group” with different expectations.
This assumption has empirical support. For instance, by examining how ordinary
readers and atypical readers (i.e. translators) read a translated webpage from Apple,
Choi (2016) found that readers perceive translation errors differently when their
reading purposes and roles vary.
On balance, issues of complex causation that enable or hinder high-stakes intercul-
tural communication have received only sporadic scholarly attention. Few studies have
shed light on the ways in which ethical concerns, such as trust, might also affect
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 205

heterogenous readerships’ perceptions. As Chesterman (1997/2016, 179) suggests, trans-

lators “must be trusted by all parties involved, both as a profession and individually”.
Nevertheless, as “a key socio-cultural aim and ambition for intercultural mediation”,
the application and operation of trust have “remained underexplored in translation”
(Rizzi, Lang, and Pym 2019, 4). Some translation scholars have studied trust with refer-
ence to the translator’s ethical judgements (Chesterman 2001), but a dearth of attention
to the reception side remains. One exception is Delia Chiaro’s study (2002) on interpret-
ing: because an audience trusted a famous television host, his interpreting performance
was more accepted than might be expected, regardless of his evident linguistic mistakes.
The untapped sources of empirical evidence for trust-making among readers have been
suggested (Rizzi, Lang, and Pym 2019) as a way of moving reception studies beyond
textual assessment and towards a more complicated, ethical landscape, and of reaching
a clearer understanding of the serious challenges that translators face in complex inter-
cultural mediation.

Material and methods

The current study aimed to explore what factors might affect the acceptance of translated
foreign elements by investigating a heterogeneous sample of readers who evaluated trans-
lated Chinese foreign affairs discourse. A group of Twenty Two translation readers were
recruited to participate in this study’s quasi-experiment between June and December 2018
in Melbourne, Australia. In this quasi-experiment, the readers were asked to evaluate four
translation tasks. In each task, three alternative English translations of an original Chinese
text were provided, showing different levels of translator intervention. After ranking the
translations in order of preference, participants were interviewed and encouraged to
explain what would have prompted them to like or dislike a given text. Predetermined
open-ended questions were asked (e.g. “What do you like least about the translation?”,
“Do you like to read a longer text or a shorter one?”) before further probing attempted to
elicit additional in-depth information about participants’ decision-making.
Because participants were provided with various translations of the same source text,
the texts’ levels of translator intervention were fairly visible, possibly encouraging readers
to compare the alternatives. I understand that this approach lacked ecological validity
due to the translation ranking tasks’ inherent artificiality; how readers engaged with
the translations in this quasi-experiment differ from their responses to “real-life” situ-
ations. Nevertheless, this study did not aim to assess the quality of authentic translations
nor to examine the real-life reception of a given text. Instead, it focused on exploring the
factors that affect readers’ evaluation of different levels of intervention.
To analyse the ranking-task results, I used a three-point rating scale to measure the
readers’ evaluations of the translations. The most preferred rating was worth three
points, the second most preferred rating was worth two points, and the least preferred
rating was worth one point. To broaden the understanding of the mechanisms under-
lying translation reception, I also measured readers’ familiarity with the translation’s
source culture. I adopted a mixed-methods analysis approach to triangulate the quanti-
tative ranking results and the collected qualitative interview data in a bottom-up manner;
my interest was to explore the extent to which readers’ receptions could be related to their
evaluation process. Two hypotheses were proposed:
206 B. HU

H1: The less familiar the readers are with the source culture, the more likely they are to
accept a high-level intervention translation.

H2: The better the readers understand a translation’s foreignness, the more likely they are to
accept that translation.

Participants and sampling

Seventeen semi-structured interviews with the total of twenty two readers were con-
ducted. Three were focus-group interviews with Seventeen subjects; the remaining
four participants were interviewed individually. Twenty subjects were selected through
snowballing. According to their origins, length of stay in China and other demographic
information, this group of subjects was further divided into five sub-groups (see Table 1
below). The two subjects in the “experts” category were purposefully selected; both of
them had over twenty years’ experience in Chinese–Australian affairs.
Of the twenty two interviewees, six were male. Their ages ranged from 19 to 52 years
(mean: 26 years). The interviewees had a high level of education: all had a bachelor’s
degree, seven had a master’s degree and four had a PhD. All subjects were coded accord-
ing to the sequence and the type of interview as well as the gender, age and readership
categories to which they belonged. For example, a 19-year-old male subject who partici-
pated in the first individual interview in the “Never been to China” group was coded as
IN1M19N.
A multiple-choice question (MCQ) survey was designed to quantify the participants’
level of knowledge of China. Participants gained scores between 31 and 40 (full mark).
Each multiple-choice question was designed to test the reader’s understanding of one

Table 1. Readers’ demographic information and the scores of knowledge of Chinese and knowledge
of China.
Readership category Code Nationality First language Knowledge of Knowledge of
(L1) Chinese China
Never been to China FG1F19N- Australian English 0 34
a
FG1F22N Australian English 0 33
FG1F19N- Indian English 0 31
b
FG2F19N Australian English 0 33
FG2M52N Australian English 0 31
IN1M19N Australian English 1 33
IN2F24N Australian English 0 34
Less than 3 months IN1F19L3 Australian English 0 33
In2F19L3 Australian English 0 36
IN3F25L3 Australian English 0 33
More than 3 months IN1F24M3 Australian English 3 37
IN2F26M3 Australian English 2 37
IN3F25M3 Australian English 1 37
Chinese Diaspora FG1F20D Singaporean English 3 35
FG1M22D Malaysian Malay 2 37
IN1F34D Singaporean Hakka 3 37
Students from mainland IN1M25C Chinese Chinese 4 37
China IN3M26C Chinese Chinese 4 38
IN3F26C Chinese Chinese 4 37
IN3F27C Chinese Chinese 4 38
Experts IN1M41EX Australian Chinese 4 40
IN2F51EX Australian Chinese 4 39
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 207

of the ten Chinese culture-bound terms selected from the government-led China Key-
words Database.1
The subjects’ demographic information and the scores for Knowledge of China are pre-
sented in Table 1.
Participation was voluntary and anonymous. Prior to the interviews, each subject was
asked to read a plain language statement and then signed a consent form. Permission was
secured to audio-record all spoken parts of the experiment. The participants completed
the interviews in their preferred language: all in English, except IN2F51EX and the four
subjects in the “students from mainland China” category, who preferred being inter-
viewed in Chinese. The transcript quoted and analysed in this article was edited
against the original recordings, and I translated the Chinese parts into English.

Instruments
The four source texts used in the experiment (STs that were coded as Mn-ST1, Mn-ST2,
Mn-ST3 and Mn-ST4), which have an average length of 150 words, were selected from
official publications of the Chinese government to represent features typical of
Chinese foreign affairs discourses that cover four genres: government reports, official
speeches, publicity materials and state media commentaries. Here, the concept of
“foreign affairs discourse” is circumscribed as a country’s official discourse on its
culture-bound, ideological agendas, presumably produced for international readers.
The selected STs concern the government’s policies, cultural exchange and political
ideology, and all aim to encapsulate various dimensions of foreignness. In the exper-
iment, the lowest-intervention translations were adapted from official translations pub-
lished by the Chinese Government, and I wrote the medium- and highest-intervention
translations. Figure 1 is an excerpt of M2-ST with its three different translations,
which illustrate how the experiment’s materials were designed and presented.
In the source text, the Chinese idiom “桃李不言，下自成蹊” (tao li buy an, xia zi
cheng xi) is used by the Chinese president Xi Jinping to appraise the achievement of
the China-led Belt and Road Initiative. The original idiom means “the will to do good
will be praised”. M2-INT retains the element of foreignness to maximally maintain cul-
tural distance, M2 + INT uses a matching version in English to show cultural proximity,
and M2++INT radically omits the foreignness and summarises it instead.

Quantitative results
For each task, participants were asked to rank the three translations from 1 (most favour-
able) to 3 (least favourable). Figure 2 shows the participants’ ranking scores for each
translation in the four tasks.
As Figure 2 shows, the translated texts that have a medium degree of translator inter-
vention (+INT) were the most preferred, except for M3 + INT, which was slightly less
favoured than M3-INT. Notably, the texts with the highest degree of translator interven-
tion (++INT) were the least preferred in all four tasks. To investigate to what extent other
underlying parameters might correlate with translation reception, another explanatory
variable, namely knowledge of China, was tested and analysed quantitatively.
208 B. HU

Figure 1. Excerpt of MT2 and its three alternative translations.

Figure 2. Mean scores of each translation in each task.

 TRANSLATION STUDIES 209

Table 2. Correlation between knowledge of China and mean scores of different level translator-
intervention translations.
-INT* +INT ++INT
Correlation with Knowledge of China (r) 0.50 −0.17 −0.30
P-value 0.02 0.45 0.17
Note: *p <0 .05.

Here, “knowledge of China” is defined as the participant’s familiarity with China’s pol-
itical context. As shown in Table 2, there was a positive correlation between the readers’
acceptance of literal translations (-INT) and their knowledge of China, r = 0.50, p = 0.02.
No significant correlation between the participants’ background knowledge of China and
their preferences for + INT and ++INT translations was observed.
According to the quantitative results, the readers’ receptions were bound by the
subject matter of the text (the four tasks have four distinct themes) and their familiarity
with the source culture. What remains unclear is why there is such considerable variation
in readers’ acceptance of different levels of translator intervention and how the readers’
familiarity with the source culture is only sensitive to lowest-intervention translations. I
thus use a qualitative, bottom-up approach to analyse the ways in which individual
readers made sense of their ultimate choices, which will be discussed in the following
section.

Qualitative results
Based on the study’s qualitative interview data, this section will examine why and under
what conditions readers might accept a certain degree of translator intervention.

Low intervention might “make no sense”

Not surprisingly, low-intervention translations attracted criticism in this study. One
deficiency of low-intervention, close translation is the risk of unreadability due to linguis-
tic asymmetries. A typical expression in Chinese can sound strange in English when every
single word is rendered literally. Commenting on the literalism of M3-INT, IN1M19N
argued, “No one says that”. When asked how they understood the word-for-word trans-
lation “four-pronged comprehensive plan” of the Chinese four-aspect policy 四个全面
(si ge quan mian), many readers complained: “I have no idea what it means”.
For IN2F24N and FG2F19N, the low-intervention translations were “stilted”, “weird”,
“clumsy and a little bit funny”, leading to suspicions that the texts might have been
created by automatic machine translation. When a word-for-word translation makes
little sense to the reader, as IN2F24N indicated, the translation “loses” its audience,
and the translator’s credibility diminishes.
Another risk of low-intervention translation is misunderstandings. In Task 3, when
the Chinese premier Li Keqiang was speaking to a stadium of Australian football specta-
tors, he used the word 喜欢 (xi huan) to express his support for both teams. This word
can be literally translated as “love” in English. Nevertheless, the literalism merely caused
confusion. IN2F26M3 remarked that the word “love” is too strong to be appropriate. For
IN2F18L3, the word “love” made the Chinese premier appear “insincere” and “fake”: how
210 B. HU

could it be possible that a foreign politician “loves” two never-before-seen Australian

teams? Presumably, the translator did not realise that this low-effort translation would
run the risk of being misunderstood (the “love” version is an official translation published
on an Australian Government’s website). Nevertheless, in this case, misunderstanding is
more dangerous than incomprehensibility because it can send a message in unexpected
directions; translators who adopt this approach might know little about how their
readers’ will interpret the text.
A foreign flavour due to low-intervention translation could also be problematic. For
some respondents, a foreign element simply made them “uncomfortable” (IN2F18L3),
since they felt alienated from the translational act. In particular, ideological differences
were met with scepticism. FG2M52N recalled that as soon as he had seen the phrase
“the Party Central Committee” in M4-INT, he “suspected [that the text] was written
for communist people”. The suspicion then induced a critical attitude towards the trans-
lation’s assumed propaganda agenda, making the text appear less trustworthy. Seemingly,
the more a reader feels excluded from the translation, the more distrust they might feel
about the very purpose of the communication (cf. Pym 2010).

The values of a low-intervention approach

Nevertheless, this study shows that overlooking the practical value of low-intervention
approaches would be unwarranted. FG1F20D seemed to expect to read a translation
that was as “close as possible” to the original, signifying a desire for a kind of ethics of
sameness. Meanwhile, IN1F24M3 regarded a “direct translation” as a compliment, cor-
responding to the reader’s expectations for “accuracy”. This response is analogous to
Nord 2018, 46) “documentary” translations; a translation can serve as a close represen-
tation of the original, functioning as a form of documentation.
Interestingly, I found that low-level intervention sometimes created desirable effects,
however unintentionally. In M3-INT, the proverb 热烈欢迎 (re lie huan ying) was lit-
erally rendered as “warmly welcome”, indicating that the Chinese premier’s visit was
well received by the Australian football fans. As a preliminary study on the production
side had shown (Hu 2020), most Chinese translators believed that the low-intervention
translation of the empty Chinese cliché was semantically redundant, if not awkward. Sur-
prisingly, for many Australian readers, the low-intervention translation reflected “geni-
ality” and how “hospitable” Australians are: “it shows that we were treating [the Chinese
premier] well” (IN3F25M3).
More strikingly, the readers’ preferences for low-intervention approaches shown in
this study challenge the assumption that correct comprehension is the premise for trans-
lation acceptance, the legacy of mainstream reception studies. Although some readers
ranked M2-INT, the lowest-intervention translation of the “peaches and plums”
idiom, as their first preference, they could not always explain its meaning. When
asked how she understood her favourite version M2-INT, FG1F19N-a hesitated:
“((Um)), I think it’s almost … ((hesitation)) … I don’t know … ((hesitation)) … It’s
almost like … ((hesitation))”.
So why did the readers like a translation that involved a significant amount of specu-
lative guesswork? This preference may have resulted from the translation’s literal render-
ing of foreignness sounding “interesting” (FG1F19N-a). In Task 2, the “peaches and
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 211

plums” idiom was quoted by the Chinese president to describe the successful inter-
national cooperation of the China-initiated economic project. The Australian readers
made some creative guesses for the low-intervention translation. For FG1F22N, it
meant that the project is as attractive as a tree that provides a shaded, cool area for
fruit pickers. The “shade” association might not exist in the original, but the Chinese pre-
sident did use the idiom as a metaphor, construing the initiative as an umbrella to share
and protect the interests of member countries. FG2M52N admitted that he did not
“understand what the [idiom] means”, but he “like[d]” the low intervention version,
as it created “a bit of imagery”. In this context, an incomplete comprehension does
not dim readers’ enjoyment of foreignness. Rather, the readers are keen to construe
meanings through their own interpretations, a point that I will return to in the “Discus-
sion” section below.
If readers trust that foreign elements are worth exploring, they become more willing to
invest extra cognitive effort to decode some unfamiliarity. However, for most ordinary
readers, the demand for cognitive effort is at stake. As FG2F19N pointed out, if a
foreign element only appears once, he is likely to “google it” because “it’s kind of inter-
esting”. Essentially, the effort needed to process an unfamiliar concept should be less than
the enjoyment generated by exoticism (cf. Gutt 2000). This understanding gives rise to
the proposal for “moderate foreignness”: as IN2F24N suggested, the more “shared
ground” the readers can find in a translation, the more they can appreciate a text. Some-
what ironically, complete foreignness is rarely trusted (“No offence. But [M1-INT]
sounds quite communist”, stated FG2F19N, who argued that the ideology-bound
content did not sound “true” to Western ears). This distrust indicates that readers
accept foreignness by degree: a glimpse of cultural exotism that can resonate in the
target culture is attractive, while a distinguishable ideological distance shown in a trans-
lation appears alarming.

Norm-conforming can be suspicious

In a call for more empirical research on norm-conforming, Chesterman (2006) asked
how people in a foreign culture react if an outsider behaves in accordance with their
internal norms. The responses to higher-intervention translation presented in the
current study offer some tentative answers to this question.
This quasi-experiment clearly showed that many readers appreciate the transla-
tor’s effort. Translators’ credibility increases if their norm-conforming is read as “a
good understanding” of the target culture (INM41EX). For IN2F18L3, this norm-
conforming shows the translator’s intention to “reach out” to the target community,
making the translator more trustworthy. To support this argument, the interviewee
aptly quoted Nelson Mandela’s famous saying, “If you talk to a man in a language
he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes
to his heart”.
A major reason for the appreciation is cognitive. A higher-intervention translation
(e.g. “actions speak louder than words” in M2 + INT) usually sounds “familiar” to
target readers: as FGF19N phrased it, “my brain is kind of latched on it”. This ties in
with the virtues of predictability of Chesterman’s “norm-based ethics” (2001, 141): if a
translation is done in norm-conforming ways, it is more predictable and easier to accept.
212 B. HU

However, readers’ reactions in this study expressed some lingering doubts about con-
forming to target-culture norms. For example, IN1F24M3 doubted the extent to which a
Chinese idiom could be replaced by an established English proverb because of cultural
untranslatability. Moreover, conformity can be viewed as neither necessary nor worth-
while. For IN1F19L3, doing nothing (i.e. a low-intervention approach) is better than
risking an error in translating source text into a target-culture idiom: “You might
misuse a cultural idiom or use it in a way that delights some people but offends
others, and that’s incredibly risky”.
The next question that arose from this study’s findings was whether an intervention
would be trusted if a translator did not misuse target-culture terms. For IN1F19L3, the
answer was clearly “no”, as she “would be very surprised to hear anyone who wasn’t
an Australian” use “very Aussie” slang words. The “very Aussie” words used in higher
degrees of intervention could be understood as “culturemes” (Nord [1991] 2018, 32), cul-
tural phenomena that are uniquely present in culture A but not in culture B. This reader’s
reservations also echo the so-called “unique items hypothesis” (Tirkkonen-Condit 2004),
which suggests that translators tend to normalise the text by reducing the presence of cul-
turemes. For the readers, the use of unique items may indicate that translations are not
“normal” (cf. Chesterman 2007, 3) and, thus, untrusted.
The trust issue is parallel to Parsons’s (1953) sociological theory of boundary-main-
taining systems, which holds that systems maintain their demarcation by distinguishing
between trustworthy insiders and suspicious outsiders. In Task 4, due to a high-interven-
tion approach, the Chinese premier’s words were translated as “wearing two footy scarves
is a bit hot”. Some Australian interviewees had issues with the slang expression “footy”.
As IN1F24M3 put it, “This is a very Australian thing to say, which is why I would doubt
that the Chinese premier would have said that”. A high level of intervention, therefore,
incurred some suspicion of inaccuracy and insincerity. IN1F24M3 argued that, if the
Chinese premier had tried so hard to sound like an Australian, “but he could never
be”, “it would only annoy [Australian] people”, planting an implicit doubt about the
speaker’s purpose and trustworthiness (cf. Mossop 1990). This translation’s high-level
intervention was regarded with suspicion, causing the mediator to be viewed as an intru-
der pretending to be an insider in the target culture.

Discussion
A good deal of empirical evidence in this study has indicated that the boundary between
the acceptance of distance and the acceptance of proximity is much more blurred. The
role of trust in hybrid receptions can be extrapolated through a thematic analysis of
this study’s interview data. The following section will examine this key point.

A desire for distance

The Australian readers interviewed in this study were happy to experience foreign
flavours in the presented translations – as long as the foreignness was trusted as desirable
exoticism or understood as a result of untranslatability.
Contrary to my initial hypothesis, even when literalism causes comprehension pro-
blems on the reception side, the readers who have scant knowledge of the source
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 213

culture may still sometimes accept a low-level intervention in the translated text. Many
participants who openly confessed that they had no idea of what the literal translation of
the Chinese idiom “peaches and plums” meant still ranked this translation as their
favourite. Readers’ acceptance is bound to a moral concern for sameness: a translation
should manifest some features of the original perceived as “the same”. A low-intervention
translation allows the other to appear as other, which is considered as “authentic”
(IN2F18L3) and “truthlike” (IN1F34D).
This positive response to low-intervention translation also suggests that the presence
of foreign elements may capture the reader’s interest (Chesterman 2016). When some
readers provided their own incorrect but surprisingly creative interpretations of foreign-
ness, exoticism seemed to arouse curiosity and inspire admiration. This reveals the possi-
bility of “superiority of the unknown” (Pym 2010, 149), which concords with Toury’s
tolerance of interference: readers’ acceptance of foreignness presumably “increase[s]
when translation is carried out from a ‘major’ or highly prestigious language/culture”
(2012, 278; see also Even-Zohar 1990).
On the surface, the passion for foreignness might be simply relegated to readers’ per-
sonalities since some readers are more open-minded than others when engaging with the
unknown. Nevertheless, as IN2F26M3 pointed out, “people need to be a bit more literate”
with unfamiliar cultures. The acceptance of a low-intervention approach reflects a view
that translation’s pedagogical function should be trusted. As cross-cultural communi-
cation has increased, dealing with differences has become not only desirable but also
necessary.

Losing trust in proximity

When Chesterman (2006, 191) called for more empirical studies on the reception of
norm-conforming, what he probably expected was that conforming to the target-
culture behaviour would be applauded by the target audience. Chesterman gave an
example in which a Western journalist was the only person allowed to participate in a
Hindu religious rite because, unlike other Westerners, she behaved like a local believer.
The empirical data from the present study provides some counterevidence. Quantitat-
ively speaking, all of the highest-intervention translations that attempted to minimise
cultural distance were rated as the least acceptable in all of this study’s tasks. This
finding shattered my initial assumption that higher-intervention translation would be
more easily accepted as more fluent due to its adherence to the target stylistic and cultural
conventions. Therefore, if translation reception is not determined by readability, we need
to set the scene with a look at some extra-linguistic considerations.
In this study, many readers encountered problems of trust concerning the legitimacy
of high-intervention translation. One of the most frequent comments on the higher-
intervention texts was, “This is not a translation”. Of course, the interviewees should
have understood that each text they evaluated had been “translated” from an original,
albeit sometimes in radical ways. However, the idea that translations must bear some
kind of resemblance to original texts if they are to be accepted has taken root in
readers’ minds.
There are two reasons for this perspective. First, this study’s readers were upset
because they could hardly trust the purpose of a high-level intervention. As
214 B. HU

IN2F24N argued, when she felt that a translator was deliberately “trying to please you to
get what they want”, she would “distrust the person”. A common-sense reading would
see such norm-conforming as a risky “assimilationist” approach (Venuti 1998, 2).
Second, any omission or rewriting means some loss, making the readers wonder, “If
[the translators] have hidden this, what else have they constrained?” (FG2F19N). Under-
lying this insecurity was an insistence on an ethical equivalence between the source text
and its translation. Equivalence can be understood in a loose sense, such as Ludwig Witt-
genstein’s “family resemblance” (1958, 32) (a concept taken up by translation scholars),
James Holmes’s “matching” (1988), or Chesterman’s “similarity” (1996). But a trans-
lation will only be legitimated if the target readers believe that a kind of “optimal resem-
blance” (Gutt 2000) has been maintained. As IN1F34D commented on the highest-
intervention text in Task 3, “I don’t believe that [an Aussie slang expression] appears
in the original. None of this [M3++INT] is true”. When readers felt that the source
text had been distorted, their trust in the translation fell sharply.
For translation scholars, readers’ resistance to translator interventions may be
somewhat disappointing. Holz-Mänttäri (1984), Vermeer (2012) and other like-
minded functionalists have advocated for translators to have greater freedom to
make decisions for the reader, acting as cultural consultants and advisers. However,
the present empirical study shows that readers may often distrust translators’
decisions to intervene. When dealing with high-stakes foreign affairs discourse, the
(Australian) readers prefer to trust their own interpretations of the source text: “[I
want to] judge on my own” (IN3F25M3). Interestingly, this study shows that
higher-intervention solutions, such as omission, are deemed unethical – but explicita-
tion is found to be accepted with a fair degree of ease. The reasons for these findings
are both textual and ethical. Editing out is considered an alarming indicator of
manipulation, whereas more explicit explanations break contextual constraints and,
thus, enhance transparency in the translational act. This view is particularly evident
in the readers’ ethical call for an “objective” (FG1F19N-a), “neutral” (IN2F18L3)
and even “truthlike” (IN1F34D) translation. In other words, the readers are apt to
trust a translation that looks authentic and intact in order to avoid feeling misled
and probably manipulated.

Translation acceptance as a compromise

On the whole, the empirical data presented in this study have revealed readers’ varying,
somehow irreconcilable responses to translator intervention, prompting us to concretise
the phenomenon of translation reception without falling into an either/or trap. I suggest
that readers’ acceptance is not a matter of polarised opposites but, rather, a matter of
degree. It is a complex trade-off evaluation process, rather than a simple binary difference
between absolute acceptance and complete refusal.
On the theoretical level, I am specifically interested in reader’s hierarchical judgement
of a translation. Why do they value linguistic resemblance at a premium, and under what
circumstances do they prioritise easy readability? My tentative answer is that translation
reception is a process of compromise in which one kind of loss is traded for another (cf.
Gutt 2000), sometimes even unconsciously. I found trust to be the key factor influencing
the trade-off mechanisms underlying readers’ receptions. Thus, translation entails a
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 215

compromise: for instance, readers readily accept a text that might not be entirely satis-
factory but can still be trusted. The idea of translation acceptance as a trust-based com-
promise foregrounds two dimensions: purpose-oriented and dynamics-inherited.
With respect to the first, purpose-oriented sense, readers have various priorities. This
study has shown that a formally equivalent, low-intervention translation received fewer
favourable judgements by those readers whose main purpose was to quickly understand
what was happening. Readers then desired a fluent text since their main loss was spend-
ing much cognitive effort without an obvious reward (cf. Gutt 2000). On the other hand,
some participants (e.g. the experts and the Chinese culture lovers) in this study preferred
a linguistically close translation because they trusted the low-intervention text to illumi-
nate unfamiliar cultures or help them refer back to the source text if necessary.
As for the second, dynamics-inherited sense, readers’ reception of translation sol-
utions is not a single, fixed statement. The fact that the same reader reacts differently
to the same solution (e.g. explicitation) when engaging with different subject matters
further complicates the picture of translation reception. For example, FG1F19N-a pre-
ferred the explicit M1 + INT because it “gives extra information”, which helped them
better understand the Chinese policy. However, the same reader complained that a
detailed account in M4 + INT merely made them feel “stressed”. The idea of trust
plays a key role in readers’ changing distribution of efforts. A perceived high-risk com-
municative context (e.g. ideology-related content) is often less trusted by readers, making
them prefer to invest more effort in decoding a literal but formally equivalent translation.
However, if the translator is recognised as trustworthy (e.g. in terms of identity or qua-
lification), the perceived risk of manipulation will be considered lower, and the reader
will exert less processing effort, making a higher-level intervention text easily accepted.
In this process, trust can be viewed as a cognitive reaction whose consequence affects
readers’ judgement of a translation. In other words, trust (or distrust) and effort grow
in tandem. From a rather relativist perspective, readers do not always act rationally,
but they judge translations in a self-serving, risk-averse way.
Hence, solution determinism is not suggested. One can hardly claim that a reader will
always prefer cultural distance or proximity. Readers do not evaluate texts according to
neat, fixed expectancy norms; rather, they make their decisions by balancing risks and
rewards. Depending on subject matter or communicative situation, a certain amount
of virtue A is deemed to be balanced against with a certain amount of virtue B.
Thus, we break with the naïve assumption that readers always need to “like” a trans-
lation in order to accept it. Expert readers ranked low-intervention solutions rather
highly not because they liked the word-for-word translation but because its tangible cor-
respondence to the form of the source text was more trusted as authentic: some other
non-expert readers preferred an awkward, low-intervention translation over a fluent
rewriting, positing that they like literalism seems ill-advised; instead, because the
traces of alterity are assumed to be more trustworthy, for several readers, a translation
should not read like an original (Mossop 1990).
Tracing the ways in which trust is accrued is no easy task, and no less problematic is
attempting to build trust in cultural transactions. Drawing from Rizzi, Lang, and Pym’s
(2019) three types of trust (i.e. interpersonal, institutional and cultural), this study reveals
at least three possible ways in which trust can be created through linguistic and cultural
mediation. The first way is interpersonal trust, which refers to the professional and social
216 B. HU

relationships between translators, readers and other stakeholders. In this sense, trust
increases with group membership. Individual readers must trust translators’ socio-cul-
tural identities and ideological positionings, especially when dealing with such a high-
risk foreign affairs discourse. For instance, when IN2F18L3 suspected that a translation
had been done by Chinese translators who attempted to “say something good” about
China and speak for the Chinese Communist Party, no matter how fluent the translation
was, the reader’s willingness to accept the text was relatively low.
Beyond the personal, an institutional level of trust also affects the acceptance of trans-
lation – largely based on translators’ expertise and hence the credibility of their work. This
study has shown that readers tend to accept texts that “sound professional” (FG1F19N-b)
and “authoritative” (IN2F51EX). When readers suspect a norm-conforming text of being
“manipulated” (IN1F34D), they often refuse that text because it seems, prima facie, to
betray the value of equivalence underpinning translators’ profession. Notably, explicitation
was found to be another effective way to increase readers’ trust in translators’ motives since
more explicit information increases transparency in a general sense.
The third level of trust concerns cultural conventions. Consider, for instance, the
desire for exoticism. Many readers favour a certain degree of foreignness because a trans-
lation is expected to be exotic or “overt”, as House (1981) would say. Nevertheless, the
norm-bound expectations might vary across different repertoires or polysystems (cf.
Even-Zohar 1990).
I contend that distrust may not be completely resolved and, although its negative
impact might be ameliorated by encouraging more intercultural exchanges, approaches
to addressing distrust cannot be reduced to once-and-for-all, binary translation sol-
utions. On the other hand, a compromise can be reached more easily if readers are
willing to invest more trust in translators, hence accepting a broader range of translator
interventions. This compromise sheds some light on the production side of translation:
translators need to persuade readers – sometimes implicitly – of their trustworthiness in
order to make their translations acceptable.

Conclusion
This empirical study has focused on the ways in which a heterogeneous group of readers
responded to different levels of translator intervention. Methodologically, translator
intervention was used as an inductive and exploratory construct, seeking to remedy
the perils of dualism in order to explore various methods of dealing with foreignness.
Theoretically, this study’s results concern the reversal of the traditionally reductive binar-
isms of translation acceptance, foregrounding the ethical aspects of intercultural com-
munication. It has shown that the readers’ receptions are not determined by a single
binary translation strategy; rather, they are affected by subjective perceptions of the trans-
lations’ trustworthiness.
In relation to my first research question, the quantitative results have suggested that
the acceptance of foreignness is by no means deterministic. The qualitative findings
have shown that, if a translation is received as “neutral”, “accountable” or “authentic”,
a wider range of solutions is likely to be accepted. The determining cause of this accep-
tance is whether the readers trust how foreignness is conveyed, which addresses my
second research question.
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 217

Admittedly, readers’ reactions to trusting or distrusting a text are not neutral; in trans-
lational communication, readers themselves are not value-free and they might be con-
strained by their different ideological perspectives and political considerations.
However, nothing suggests that successful communication should be thwarted by differ-
ences. We trust the other side not merely because we are already fully acquainted or in
agreement with each other but also because we need to trust each other in order to tra-
verse unknown territory in intercultural communication.
This somewhat idealised view is relevant to the formulation of realistic standards of
translation acceptance, which entails a compromise model explaining readers’ hierarch-
ical reception. This model helps us counterbalance the pessimistic idea that a compre-
hensive understanding should be the sine qua non of translation acceptance. This
study’s empirical results have shown that readers do not harbour uniform expectations
of translation. To maximise benefits and minimise effort (Gutt 2000), readers ultimately
choose a certain level of translator intervention and justify it as acceptable. This finding
posits that an absolutely optimal translation is practically unattainable and is perhaps
unnecessary. An acceptable translation is, after all, “good enough” (cf. Hönig 1997).
Rather than pursuing pure excellence, examining the conditions under which readers
are willing to accept an apparently flawed translation could be more promising.
At the same time, two main methodological constraints should be noted. First, this
study faced limitations in terms of its sample size and diversity. Most of its participants
were university graduates, and the number of subjects in each readership category was
small. Future research should investigate wider readership profiles to provide alternative
or complementary interpretations.
The second limitation of the current study concerns its ecological validity. Participants
were told that they were simultaneously comparing three translations of the same source
text, which is far from a typical way of responding to translations. This research design
further compounds the role of trust in reception because, when comparing the alterna-
tives, readers might perceive the most completely rendered and least-altered text as the
most reliable translation. Nevertheless, this approach enabled a direct observation of how
the readers made compromises. This quasi-experiment found that readers usually dis-
trusted a translation not merely because some elements were comparatively omitted
but because the translation was overtly adapted to target norms and, therefore, regarded
as “untrue” since manipulation might have occurred. This study’s process of judging and
weighing has provided empirical evidence per se in that it has illuminated the factors that
affect readers’ trust levels (interpersonal, institutional and cultural). Future studies could
examine whether this argument remains valid if readers solely evaluate a norm-conform-
ing text in a more true-to-life situation.
Another consideration is intertwined with the subjectivity–objectivity dichotomy that
usually leads to oversights in empirical and experimental research in translation studies.
Although no direct evidence suggests that the researcher’s identity and presence in this
study significantly influenced the interviewees, but because this study’s qualitative data
aligns with its quantitative results, adopting a reflexive view of the pre-constructed con-
cepts and theoretical questions that guide such research is important (Dizdar 2014).
I hope that as our knowledge of how translation reception is conditioned by trust
increases, we can progressively generate a substantial body of research on the impact
of ethical considerations on translation acceptance. The ethical dimension of translation
218 B. HU

acceptance is likely to provide new insights into the possibilities and pitfalls of transla-
tional contacts (and, mutatis mutandis, interpreting), prompting constructive solutions
to improve trust-building in intercultural communication.

Note
1. The China Keywords Database (http://keywords.china.org.cn/), produced by the China
Academy of Translation, can be used to find out how Chinese political terms and phrases
are officially translated into English.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on contributor
Bei Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University
of Singapore. Her research interests lie in high-stakes intercultural communication, institutional
translation and reception studies with a focus on empirical and experimental methods.

ORCID
Bei Hu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2409-7762

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