Reception of Jin Yong’s Wuxia Novels in English and French: A Sentiment Analysis with Reflection

Abstract

This research investigates the reception of English and French translations of Jin Yong’s Wuxia novels through sentiment analysis --- a text mining technique which helps uncover readers’ opinions of these translated literary works from their online reviews. The findings show that almost all of the published English/French versions of Jin Yong’s Wuxia novels are well received by readers in both languages in terms of fictional details like “character”, “plot” and “narratives”, despite there are some minor complains. These findings lead us to reflect on the current literary position of Wuxia translations in the English and French-speaking countries, where translated Wuxia works positioning as “Chinese literary classics” may partly help facilitate further reception of this type of traditional Chinese literature in the West.