Translating China's living heritage: Cultural activity in Nanning explores sharing heritage through art

During the China-ASEAN (Nanning) Theater Week, a group of international translators and scholars joined a special side program, the Sinologists Translation Workshop, to explore how China's living heritage can be shared with the world through performance, literature and innovation.

Jointly organized by the China National Publications Import & Export (Group) Co., Ltd. (CNPIEC), the Center for Language Education and Cooperation (CLEC), and the Organizing Committee of China-ASEAN (Nanning) Theater Week, the workshop formed part of one of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region's flagship cultural festivals, which brings together artists, writers and performers from across Asia each year.

The Vietnamese delegation presented theater materials to Nanning Museum's permanent archive, a gesture of friendship and shared heritage.

"Art changes, but friendship should remain," said a member of the Vietnamese delegation while making the presentation.

The idea that culture lives through exchange ran through the days that followed as the group traveled from theater stages to dye workshops, museums and AI labs. Each place offers its own answer to the same question: How do you translate a living culture?

From page to practice

Rain was falling as we arrived at the Nanyang Guyuepo Demonstration Village, but the courtyard was alive with sound.

Musicians from Guangxi's ethnic minority groups played the erhu, tianqin and lusheng, traditional Chinese musical instruments, their bright costumes standing out against the grey sky.

Each visitor received one of the region's embroidered silk balls, a symbol of friendship and welcome.

Lunch began with a lesson: how to roll glutinous rice balls, each one colored with natural plant dyes used for generations in local celebrations.

Later, in the adjoining workshop, artisans showed how other dyes are used in cloth-making, folding, tying and dipping cotton into indigo, which turns a bright blue when exposed to air.

Wu Baiqiang, deputy director of the Guangxi Nationalities Publishing House, said his team uses the same commitment to authenticity of tradition when documenting Guangxi's heritage.

"In the past, we went into the fields and rural areas to collect stories by hand," he said. "Now, we use cameras and video. While recording the text, we also capture the scenery, food and characters that surround those stories. When people read our books, they can also see and hear the life behind the words."

Wu said that publishing houses like his play a key role in connecting local culture with international audiences.

"By telling Chinese stories and telling Guangxi stories well, more and more foreign friends can learn about our whole China," he said. "We have many good and interesting stories in Guangxi, as well as delicious and fun things we can share with friends everywhere."

For Wu, books are only the beginning. "People everywhere like to read," he said. "Through reading, we learn about different cultures. But here, we also rap folk songs, dance folk dances and talk about folk instruments. It turns the words into something vivid, a lesson in life itself."

His point was hard to miss. What starts on the page continues in the places it describes, from the food on the table to the sounds echoing across the village.

Connecting with the ancient past

The next stop was the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Museum, where centuries of the region's culture are kept and studied.

Bronze drums, festival costumes and embroidered jackets filled the exhibition halls, not as relics, but as evidence of living traditions still practiced across Guangxi.

Displays trace over twelve millennia of life in Guangxi, from early Neolithic settlements and ancient bronze drums to artifacts from the Tang and Ming dynasties.

Our guide, Mo Lulu, said every display has a story behind it.

"People come for the object," she said, "but they leave with the story."

She explained how patterns and motifs have traveled across Guangxi for generations, carried along trade routes and through intermarriage between ethnic groups.

The designs, colors and rhythms tell of migration and connection, showing how Guangxi's identity has always been built on exchange.

Sound and image come together throughout the museum.

Recordings of songs play beside the artifacts, so visitors can see and hear how each item would have been used, turning the space into a working archive of the region's cultural life.

Stories from the past, written for the future

During one session of the Sinologists Translation Workshop, Li Shanshan, a children's author and invited expert of the Sinologists Translation Workshop, spoke about how children's literature can cross borders when translated well.

"I'm very happy to share my creative experience with you here," she shared with me in an interview. "The books I've created in the past are all about dreams, courage, confidence, friendship and love. These are emotions shared by all human children. There is no threshold for reading, as long as a story is fun and imaginative, children everywhere will enjoy it."

She believes that good translation is creative work in its own right.

"Chinese stories need to be translated. They are literary creations," she said. "If translators have a good understanding of Chinese customs, people, history and culture, the translations will be more vivid and original. But translators of children's books should also have a childlike heart. If they think like children, they can better understand children's language and imagination."

Her latest book, "Abandoned City for a Thousand Years," is based on her fieldwork at Sichuan Province's Sanxingdui archaeological site.

"This book in my hands is the first long fairy tale in our country about the Sanxingdui culture and its new archaeological discoveries," Li said. "Before writing it, I spent more than a year living near the Sanxingdui and Heshan sites, talking with restorers and collecting materials. I wanted to bring their knowledge of cultural relics to life – to use children's perspectives and language to tell the stories behind them."

Writing, she said, often mirrors the restoration process itself.

"When archaeologists find fragments, they use imagination to fill the missing parts," Li said. "It's the same for writers. We fill the gaps with childlike feeling and creativity so the story becomes whole again."

Technology learns to listen

At Shenzhen Yunjin Technology Co., Ltd., Ba Can, head of the company's Guangxi Office, showed how artificial intelligence translation is changing the way people communicate.

"Right now, we're exploring how artificial intelligence can be used in real work," Ba said. "For example, a translation card like mine can connect with a mobile phone. It currently supports 128 languages and can handle audio recording, conversation translation, simultaneous translation and document translation. It uses traditional machine translation together with our large fusion model, so its overall performance is among the best on the market."

Asked how the technology could help share China's culture, she highlighted its speed and flexibility.

"Artificial-intelligence language technology is very efficient," she said. "When we tell a story, I can speak in Chinese, and the AI voice system will translate and dub it into another language with one click."

I tried a prototype of their new smart glasses. As Ba spoke, the translation appeared on the lens like a live teleprompter. It took some getting used to, following text in real time as it flashed before my eyes. It was a glimpse into what could be the future.

The human advantage

While touring the AI center, I asked Professor Chen Bing, from the translation department of the Foreign Languages College at Guangxi University and a tutor at the Sinologists Translation Workshop, what she made of the computers that are potentially coming for her job. She smiled before answering.

"In our translation practice and teaching, we use five major language models and do some editing with artificial intelligence. Leading companies are developing systems that combine AI and human editors. In technical fields, car manuals, drug instructions or chemistry, machines are faster because they can work 24 hours a day. What they create is a kind of mental productivity."

However, she said speed is not the same as understanding.

"Human translators, especially those working with literature, poetry or essays, still have a huge advantage," Chen said. "There are many things machines cannot do."

A living mosaic

Guangxi's culture mirrors its landscape, with mountain ranges and river valleys overlapping like the region's languages and traditions. More than a dozen ethnic groups live there, including the Zhuang, Yao, Miao, Dong, Maonan and Mulao. Their crafts, music and festivals form a living mosaic of color and sound: indigo-dyed fabrics, bronze drums, embroidered costumes and food that changes with each village.

One of the final stops we visited was the Yue Dong Guild Hall, a historic theater space in central Nanning. On stage, Jan Jakub Żywczok, a translator from Poland, who also competes in Chinese martial arts tournaments, offered a quick lesson with a qiang, a traditional spear used in opera and martial arts training. The technique was fast and precise, more performance than combat, and seemed to sum up much of what we'd seen that week: discipline, movement and cultural exchange expressed through action.

From traditional instruments and indigo dye to children's literature and artificial intelligence, every stop had the same goal: finding better ways to tell China's stories.

The Sinologists Translation Workshop was built on the idea that translation is not only about language, but about understanding.

The week's exchanges, from traditional crafts to artificial intelligence, all pointed to the same idea: that translation is about more than words. It's a way of keeping cultures in conversation.