The Reception of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in the English-Speaking World Based on Text Data Mining: From the Perspective of Readers’ Sentimental Attitudes

This article takes the eight translations of contemporary Chinese sci-fi novels translated by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen as the research objects, and uses text data mining technology to conduct sentiment analysis of the reader comments of the eight translations, in order to examine the readers’ sentimental attitudes towards the translations. On this basis, five of the eight translations are selected for further analysis, in which the focal topics that readers are concerned about, and the evaluative attitudes associated with these topics are investigated, along with the reasons why the relevant translations have received relatively high levels of positive evaluation from readers. The study finds that overseas English readers have a “very positive” overall evaluation of The Dark Forest and Death’s End, a “positive” overall evaluation of Invisible Planets and The Three-Body Problem, a “relatively positive” overall evaluation of Broken Stars, and an “average” overall evaluation of The Redemption of Time, Vagabonds, and Waste Tide. The topics that readers are most concerned about mainly focus on such aspects as “ideas/concepts”, “plots”, “characters/characterization” and “translation”. Most readers give positive comments on the “ideas/concepts”, “plots” and “translation” of the five selected translations, while giving “average” or “relatively negative” comments on their “characters/characterization.” The fact that the relevant translations receive readers’ relatively high levels of positive evaluation can be attributed to two primary reasons. First, the ideation and plots of these works exhibit significant appeal to English readers. Second, the high quality translation of these works — particularly Ken Liu’s application of moderate foreignization strategy and his appropriate rewriting of the original in content and texture— caters to the reading preferences and aesthetic expectations of the overseas English readers.