Abstract:This study examines the problem of “untranslatability” and “transmissibility” of Chinese classical aesthetic concepts in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication, taking the Chinese video creator Li Ziqi as a case study. Her YouTube content has attracted widespread global attention, providing an important empirical basis for understanding how traditional Chinese aesthetic experience generates cross-cultural intelligibility in digital media environments. The study argues that core categories of Chinese classical aesthetics—yijing (artistic conception), liubai (productive emptiness), qiyun (spiritual resonance), and tianren heyi (unity of Heaven and humanity)—are deeply culturally embedded and therefore resist equivalent translation at the semantic level, exhibiting a structural form of “untranslatability.” This untranslatability is manifested in three aspects: first, the formation of these concepts depends on the holistic context of Chinese philosophical and aesthetic traditions, making them irreducible to isolated terminological equivalents; second, their semantic structures are highly imagistic and generative, and thus cannot be stabilized into fixed semantic units; third, their aesthetic logic emphasizes relationality and atmospheric quality rather than objectifying or definitional articulation, which leads to semantic slippage or loss in cross-linguistic translation.
However, such untranslatability does not imply a rupture in meaning transmission; rather, it suggests that transmissibility does not rely on semantic conversion but is instead generated within a multi-modal structure of perception. The study proposes that the cross-cultural intelligibility of these aesthetic concepts emerges within a multi-modal experiential field constituted by visuals, rhythm, sound, and situational context. Specifically, the synergistic interaction of diverse digital elements forms an “atmospheric production mechanism,” enabling viewers to enter a state of aesthetic resonance prior to conceptual understanding and, in turn, allowing such affective resonance to feed back into and reshape conceptual comprehension. In this way, cross-cultural transmission is achieved through a non-semantic-centered process grounded in embodied and atmospheric experience.
Keywords: Chinese classical atmospheric aesthetics; untranslatability; multi-modal reconstruction; digital media
Minmin XIE, PhD, is a associate professor at the Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, and an assistant research fellow at the Hunan Provincial Research Base for Cross-Cultural Communication. His research focuses on American literature and translation practice. He has led and participated in several national and provincial research projects and has published articles in leading journals such as Foreign Literature Studies. His translation, A New Model of Greek Economic Development, was included in China’s 13th Five-Year Plan National Key Publication Program. He is the recipient of the First Prize of the Fourth Hunan Provincial Award for Outstanding Educational Research.
Yanyu Zeng is Professor of English and Dean of the Foreign Studies College at Hunan Normal University, China, and a Changjiang Scholar Distinguished Professor appointed by China's Ministry of Education. She is Executive Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Languages and Cultures and President of the Hunan Translators Association. Her research spans contemporary American literature, the aesthetic criticism of foreign literature, and the cross-cultural circulation of knowledge, with recent work focusing on the sociology of academic translation and the politics of scholarly recognition. The author of two monographs and numerous articles in leading academic journals, she has led several projects funded by the National Social Science Fund of China and serves as an invited reviewer for state-sponsored academic translation programs. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge, Columbia University, and Emory University.
