ArticleTranslation Theories and Skills http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.12.011
Sign Interchange and Value Symbiosis: A Comparative Corpus Analysis of Three Pieces of Trickster Tales of Three Chinese Ethnic Minorities
Fang Wen
College of Foreign Langugages, Inner Mongolia University of Technology (IMUT), Hohhot 010051, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China.
*Corresponding author: Fang Wen
Doctoral Startup Fund of IMUT (Project Name: Symbiosis and Integration of Cultural Narratives: Similarities of Folk Tales of Ethnic Minorities in Western China; Project No.: BS2024049; Time: October 2024 – October 2027).
Published: December 31, 2025
Abstract
Three pieces of trickster tales of three Chinese ethnic minorities, tales of Balagencang of Mongolian ethnic minority, tales of Afanti of Uygur, and ones of Aku Dönba of Tibetan, share a striking narrative motif: the protagnist borrowed a horse to escape from an arrogant authority. Tales of Balagencang and tales of Afanti have been recognized on China's National Intangible Cultural Heritage List (2008, 2014). This research built a small specialized corpus of these tales on similar themes and analyzed their narrative structures, cultural sign annotation, and intertextual interpretation. Comparison among these tales generated two main findings as the followings. First, all these three pieces of tales share a stable narrative structure with similar plots. Second, each tale localizes its own ethnic cultural signs. The grassland in tales of Balagencang gives way to oasis in tales of Afanti and plateau in tales of Aku Dönba. Underneath these local adaptations, these three pieces of tales shared an ethical core: wisdom prevails over arrogance, which can be interpreted as sign interchange and value symbiosis. This paper offers a semiotic lens for understanding how folk narratives travel across ethnic boundaries while preserving both their narrative structure and their moral force.
Keyword
Corpus; Trickster Tales; Sign Interchange; Value Symbiosis
References
An, C. (2003). Tibetan tourism, series of basic information of Tibet of China. China Intercontinental Press.
Lotman, J. (2005). On the semiosphere (W. Clark, Trans.). Sign Systems Studies, 33(1), 205-229.
Mang, M. (2013). Tales of Balagencang. Yuanfang Press, Inner Mongolia Publishing House.
Primerose, G., & Robert, C. F. (Trans.). (1982). The Effendi and the pregnant pot: Uygur folktales from China. New World Press.
Tashi, D. (2000). Tales of Aku Dönba. Tibet People’s Press & Hebei Province Children Press.
Tony, J. (2020). The Bloomsbury companion to contemporary Peircean semiotics. Bloomsbury Academic.
Wen, F. (2022). An intertextual comparison among three pieces of Chinese folktales: Tales of Afanti, Balagencang and Aku Dönba. Res Militaris.
Zhang, F. H. (Adapt.), & Liu, D. Z. (Illus.). (1986). The gold plant and other tales of the Effendi. Foreign Languages Press.
Copyright
© 2025 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
How to cite this paper
Sign Interchange and Value Symbiosis: A Comparative Corpus Analysis of Three Pieces of Trickster Tales of Three Chinese Ethnic Minorities
How to cite this paper: Fang Wen. (2025). Sign Interchange and Value Symbiosis: A Comparative Corpus Analysis of Three Pieces of Trickster Tales of Three Chinese Ethnic Minorities. Translation and Foreign Language Learning, 1(5), 811-816.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.12.011