A corpus-assisted textual analysis of the framing of domestic violence in the Chinese translations of W.S. Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth

Abstract Research on the translation of gendered violence has concentrated on texts in which gender politics and sexual violence are explicitly foregrounded, and much less is known about how such violence is reframed in literary works that advance no explicit feminist position. This study addresses this gap through a corpus-assisted comparative analysis, drawing on Baker’s narrative framing framework to examine domestic violence (DV) in Xian Yangyang’s 2013 and Yu Kangyong’s 1995 Chinese translations (the latter reprinted in 2016) of W. S. Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth . Quantitative and qualitative analyses examine four narrative framing strategies — selective appropriation, repositioning of participants, framing by labelling, and temporal-spatial framing — and compare representations of physical violence, psychological abuse, and sexual assault. The findings reveal systematic differences in the textual prominence and framing of DV. Xian’s translation devotes proportionally greater textual space to DV, particularly psychological abuse, and more frequently repositions participants in representations of physical violence, while Yu’s allocation of textual space to DV remains broadly proportional to the overall expansion of the translation. Close analysis reveals a more complex pattern: both translations alternately foreground, mitigate, or redistribute perpetrator agency and the force of violence across different episodes. Paratextual analysis further shows that the two editions contextualise Liza’s tragedy differently: TT1 foregrounds family deprivation, romantic desire, and fate, whereas TT2 places greater emphasis on moral categorisation, class, and socio-economic environment. These findings demonstrate that the reframing of gendered violence cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between amplification and mitigation but operates unevenly across textual strategies, episodes, and paratextual contexts. The study highlights the value of combining corpus-assisted, close textual, and paratextual analysis for examining how translation mediates representations of domestic violence, gender ideology, agency, and responsibility across cultures.