A Bibliometric Analysis of Translation Studies: A Case Study on Chinese Canon The Journey to the West

A Chinese classic novel The Journey to the West (Chinese: 西游记, pinyin: Xi You Ji) has been yielding large volumes of English renditions across genres and media in the past 120 years starting in 1895. This body of renderings gives considerable material for research on how particularly translations have been handled. To give an overview of this research, this article proposes a bibliometric analysis to sketch a map of the translation studies conducted so far on The Journey to the West. A series of queries are made: which translators are most researched; which translations are most often compared with each other; which research questions are most addressed or ignored; which theories are most applied to resolve these questions. As Rovira-Esteva et al. state, “we need maps to know where we are so as to be helped instead of unconsciously being steered by them” (p. 160). The multiple and complementary perspectives we provide in this article are constructive to identify problems and lacunas and point out future directions. The present analytical framework has been applied to English translations of a Chinese classic, but we believe it can be successfully extrapolated to other similar cases.