Yingxin Chen is a PhD researcher at SOAS University of London specialising in translation studies, Chinese literary history and detective fiction. Her doctoral research examines the translation and reception of British detective fiction in China between 1896 and 1916, with a particular focus on early Chinese versions of the Sherlock Holmes stories. By treating translation as a form of rewriting, her work explores how abridgement, addition and stylistic innovation shaped the cultural and social meanings of detective fiction during a period of profound transformation in China.

Chen’s translation research pays particular attention to the relationship between language, literary creativity and historical context. Her work compares classical Chinese, or wenyanwen, with emerging vernacular Chinese, or baihuawen, and investigates how both human translators and large language models represent these changing written forms. She is especially interested in landscape description, poetic prose and the ways early Chinese translators drew on indigenous traditions of nature writing to recreate unfamiliar British settings.

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