The Horror That Travels: A Comparative Analysis of Herbert Giles' and GPT's Translations of "The Painted Skin" through the Lens of Horror Aesthetics

Abstract

This paper examines the translation of horror aesthetics in Pu Songling's "The Painted Skin" (《画皮》) by comparing Herbert Giles' canonical 1880 Victorian-era translation with a contemporary GPT-generated translation. Drawing upon Freud's theory of the uncanny (Das Unheimliche), Kristeva's concept of abjection, and Carroll's framework of art-horror, this study argues that the two translations produce fundamentally different horror effects due to diverging translational strategies. Giles' translation, shaped by Victorian literary conventions and bowdlerization practices, domesticates the horror through Gothic narrative framing and moralistic distancing, thereby mediating the uncanny for an English readership. The GPT translation, by contrast, generated through large-scale language modeling and contemporary language conventions rather than the publishing norms of a specific historical period, so it adopts a literalist approach that preserves the original's narrative abruptness and visceral detail, generating a more immediate and unsettling horror experience. Through close comparative analysis of key horror sequences—the skin-painting revelation, the heart-tearing murder, and the abject resurrection—this paper demonstrates how translational choices at lexical, syntactic, and discursive levels reconfigure the aesthetic experience of horror across cultural and historical boundaries. The findings suggest that horror, far from being a stable textual property, is substantially reconstituted through translation, with each translational framework activating different dimensions of the horror aesthetic embedded in Pu Songling's original.