Ruilin Ding (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
uclzrd0@ucl.ac.uk

Translation in Sino-Tanzanian Decolonizing Imaginaries: A Historical Study of Swahili Translations of Chinese Books during the Socialist Era (1964–1979)

My doctoral research examines Swahili translations of Chinese books produced by Chinese state institutions and circulated in Tanzania between 1964 and 1979. It asks how translation became an institutional and material medium through which Chinese state actors imagined, addressed, and sought to mediate their relationship with socialist Tanzania and the wider decolonizing world during the Cold War.
Rather than treating these works simply as translated texts or propaganda materials, the thesis approaches them as a translational archive: a body of texts, publication histories, institutional traces, and circulation records that makes it possible to reconstruct and rethink the linguistic and material foundations of Sino-Tanzanian relations. Combining translation history, archival research, institutional analysis, and material text analysis, the project examines how Chinese books were selected, translated, edited, reviewed, published, and eventually distributed in Tanzania through state publishing, broadcasting, and diplomatic-cultural networks.

This research asks what Swahili translation did beyond the transmission of Chinese revolutionary discourse? It explores how translation was utilised by Chinese state institutions to make China, Maoism, and socialist internationalism legible to Tanzanian readers in a language closely tied to nation-building and constructing African socialism. It also asks how far state translation can be understood as the expression of a unified national will. By examining the tension between the tightly controlled production of Swahili translations in China and their uneven circulation and reception in Tanzania, the project considers how decolonizing imaginaries and solidarities were shaped, constrained, or disrupted by the interaction between Chinese political campaigns and contested socialist debates in Tanzania.

This project will potentially contribute to translation history studies by foregrounding a largely overlooked Chinese–African, socialist, and Swahili-language translational corridor. It also adds to histories of Sino-Tanzanian relations by drawing attention to the linguistic, institutional, and publishing practices through which political solidarity was mediated. More broadly, it rethinks translation not only as an object within history, but as a way of (re)writing history.

Principal supervisor: Prof. Kathryn Batchelor