On the Intertextuality of English-to-Chinese Literary Translation: A Case Study on the Chinese Translation of Overworld in Flames

This study was composed based on the author’s published translation practice, Overworld in Flames, which, written by the best-selling author with New York Times, Winter Morgan, portrays the course of how Gameknight999 and his companions avert the blazing inferno devouring the whole Overworld against unidentified attackers. Since intertextual references were found ubiquitous in the book, in consonance with the classification by N. Fairclough (1992), the author categorizes its intertextual references into manifest intertextuality and interdiscursivity, and discusses its Chinese translation. This paper demonstrates that intertextuality provides a systematic approach for identifying and handling complex intertextual relationships in literary works, guiding translators to make dynamic choices based on both theory and their own intentions, in the hope to provide some implications for translators to understand intertextual representations in literary translation and to produce better works in the future.