The translation of sex-related content in Peter Pan in China

This article discusses how sex-related content is rendered in three Chinese translations of James Matthew Barrie's Peter Pan (1911): Liang Shiqiu (1929), Yang Jingyuan (1991), and Ren Rongrong (2011). From the 1920s to the present, several major social and cultural events in China have each had a profound influence on the social environment, the literary climate, and state ideology, with implications for both publishing and translating. This article investigates how Peter Pan's rich subtext and its readership duality interacted with China's socio-cultural context at different historical moments, resulting in translations with contrasting textual features. It is found that Liang's translation is the most tolerant of sex-related content, owing to the relatively liberal socio-cultural environment and relaxed censorship protocol of the 1920s. Ren's translation is found to be the most conservative version due to its sensitivity to what is expected of translations for children in contemporary China.