"""Fresh off the boat"" or ""Canadian born Chinese"": cultural translation in the Chinese-Canadian community"

Over the course of its history, the Chinese-Canadian community has had to adapt in various ways to the encounters, similarities and differences between Chinese and Canadian cultural practices and worldviews. While the situation began with racial discrimination and self-imposed isolation in ethnic enclaves, it has evolved to champion cultural integration, but also raise questions of cultural identity in the face of cosmopolitanism. This paper, therefore, examines those issues from the perspective of cultural translation, particularly the dynamics between the I and the Other as cultures, as well as translational resistancy and accommodation. These, combined with a statistical study on self-identification in Chinese-Canadian autobiographical literature, can articulate the tension that exists within the Chinese-Canadian population as it attempts to find its niche within Canadian society: being both Chinese and Canadian. From this, both the Chinese- and mainstream-Canadian population can glean lessons for future cultural integration and preservation in a cosmopolitan setting.