CNN –
When the British Museum opened its China’s Hidden Century exhibition last month, writer and translator Yilin Wang received confusing messages from her colleagues.
The show, which featured 19th-century Chinese works, including poems by feminist and revolutionary Qiu Jin, appeared to have no credits for translators, a friend told Wang. And yet Qiu Jin’s translations seemed to draw directly on Wang’s own work – was she involved in the exhibition?
No, Wang replied: She was never contacted by the museum, which used her work without permission, payment, or credit.
A social media firestorm ensued, culminating in the British Museum issuing a statement on Thursday acknowledging the permits and recognition for Wangs Translations were “accidentally left out”.
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A map of the Qing Empire on display in the British Museum’s exhibition ‘China’s Hidden Century’ in London.
It was an “unintentional human error for which the museum has apologized to Yilin Wang,” it said, adding that it had removed her translations from the exhibition and paid for the validity period and the remaining translations offered in a printed catalogue.
But these measures fall short and the apology rings hollow, Wang said in a phone interview with CNN on Friday.
She criticized the statement for sounding passive instead of taking proper responsibility. And, she said, it fails to answer the larger questions this incident raised about ethics in science and what it describes the frequent deletion of translators – especially women and people of color.
The online controversy arose last week when Wang posted on Twitter about the use of her translations.
“Please note that this is copyright infringement… I believe you owe me some money for printing and displaying my translations, British Museum,” she said wrote in a thread, noting that her translations — which had previously been published on her website and in literary journals — had also appeared in the museum’s online guide and printed catalog accompanying the exhibition.
Since then, her post has been widely shared on Twitter, amassing nearly 53,000 likes and 15,000 retweets so far.
The British Museum has since reached out Its statement on Thursday said it “takes copyright approvals seriously.”
“As part of our work, we always try to get in touch with the owners of the rights to texts, images, print and digital media. “This was a particularly complicated project and we are aware that we made an inadvertent mistake and failed to meet our usual standards,” it said.
It added that “China’s Hidden Century” involved more than 400 people from 20 countries and that those involved “spent years putting it all together with scientists around the world.”
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A British Museum staff member pictured at the ‘China’s Hidden Century’ exhibition ahead of its public opening.
But the scale of the project hurt Wang even more when she was deleted. “How exactly did that happen?” she said. “It was funded by a research grant of over £700,000. These researchers had (almost) four years to research, they had to collect translations and create all these different formats. It’s been around for several weeks and no one thought, ‘Where are these translations coming from?’”
The exhibition was supported by a research grant of £719,327 ($914,847) from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council entitled “Cultural Creativity in Qing China 1796-1912”.
For Wang and colleagues in the translation and publishing world, this incident highlights the broader and long-standing problem of translators’ work being obscured or not mentioned.
A social media campaign called #NameTheTranslator has gained momentum in recent years, encouraging publishers, educators and reviewers to name translators alongside the original authors of literary works.
“Without translators, such works would not be accessible,” Wang said, adding that translated works make up a small minority of books published in the United States. “This is particularly bad for translators and poets.”
Many translators say that lack of credit also affects the work and expertise required for effective translation. It’s not that easy to run a text through Google Translate – in fact, a good translation depends on skills, expertise and manual dexterity that can take years to develop.
“When I translate, I use my knowledge of poetry in English, I use my knowledge of classical Chinese literature, I do background research on the poet and … on the period Qiu Jin was writing,” she said Go through 10 to 15 drafts of the same poem to find the right words, the right expression, the most eloquent way of translating idioms and allusions, the right way to capture the spirit and emotional power of poetry.” a word-for- word translation.”
It can be This is especially true for Classical Chinese, which has a very different syntax and diction than English, she said. So when translations are used without citing the source, time, effort and knowledge are wasted.
“I would urge the British Museum to negotiate with me in good faith so that they would apologize more,” Wang said, adding, “It’s really important to have conversations about copyright, about recognizing translators’ work and about making sure it doesn’t happen again and that we take action to properly address the issue.
The British Museum did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.