This PhD project explores the interplay between travel, translation, heritage and memory through a study of a 13th-century Chinese travel writing of Cambodia—the only surviving eyewitness account of heyday Angkor civilization—and its modern English translations. Integrating translation analysis (cultural and interlingual, direct and indirect) with frameworks of heritage discourse and traveling memory, it dissects:
1) how the Chinese traveler represents Cambodian in/tangible heritages as cultural translation and shapes traveling memory of Cambodia in traditional China, and
2) how the English renditions transfer and transform this ancient Chinese translation of Cambodian heritages for modern transcultural remembrance and tourist desires of a “lost civilization.”