“The Other Side of the Brocade”: Translating Fashion Blogs and Data Mining

Abstract

This article takes both a literal and figurative approach to dress and translation. With the breakthrough of social media, microblogging has become an influential medium for marketing fashion brands and products online. The article reports on the findings of a three-year research project that studied ten Irish and ten Chinese fashion microblogging influencers’ blogs using Text Mining and Netnography. The author first designed a digital tool for data mining that allows the simultaneous translation of Chinese microblogs into English and vice-versa, also enabling visualizations of most frequent words through word clouds, and displaying the context in which they were used through collocations. These linguistic and visual translations became the basis to elaborate a typology of blogging strategies. Second, using the metaphor of translation as “the other side of a brocade,” the author compares the strategies followed by the Chinese and the Irish micro-bloggers as if they were the two sides of a single work, given that they are all arranged around the same list of categories. The article thus provides empirical and visual evidence on the use of translation to understand fashion blogging and the values there expressed, across cultures.

Keywords:

• fashion
• translation
• blog
• text mining
• social media
• culture

Notes

1 The exabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. 1 EB = 10¹⁸bytes = 1000⁶bytes.

2 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

3 While dress is of course at one level rooted in local materials and traditions of craftsmanship, at another level trade and communication have ensured mutual influences, change and adaptation as designers borrow from each other internationally to remain innovative. Take for example the cheongsam, known in the Chinese mainland as Qipao and recognised today as unmistakably Chinese. It can in fact be traced back to the cultural exchange between China and the West that took place in the Concessions (1842–1946). Western tailoring techniques were applied to traditional Manchu dress, resulting in a hybrid product. (De La Garza and Ding 2013, 58).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zheng Shen

Zheng Shen is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Zhejiang University and holds a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Digital Arts and Humanities and the Department of Management and Marketing at University College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests include—but are not limited to—fashion, data mining, social media, influencer marketing, cross-cultural comparison, and interdisciplinary studies. [email protected]