Assessing reader reception of Arthur Waley’s English translation of Journey to the West: A topic modeling and sentiment analysis approach

Abstract

Arthur Waley’s 1942 abridged translation, Monkey: Journey to the West , remains one of the most influential and widely debated English renderings of this Chinese classic. Despite its extensive global cultural impact, the contemporary online reception has remained largely unexplored. This study applies an integrated computational framework — combining BERTopic topic modelling, Twitter-RoBERTa sentiment classification, and GPT-4o-assisted qualitative validation — to analyse 796 English-language reader reviews of Waley’s translation collected from Amazon and Goodreads. The study aims to systematically investigate the contemporary online reception, identify the thematic concerns and interpretive patterns of English-language readers, exploring the dynamics of its cross-cultural dissemination. The findings indicate that Monkey is generally well received among international readers (43.12% positive sentiment), driven by appreciation for Waley’s colloquial prose, Sun Wukong’s appeal as a trickster-hero, and the translation’s cross-cultural philosophical resonance and humour. Conversely, negative feedback (18.30%) is associated with structural tensions with Western narrative and heroic conventions, insufficient paratextual guidance for cultural interpretation, and ineffective multimodal delivery — most notably, British-accented audiobook narrations. The study concludes that the global circulation of Monkey is shaped by a complex interplay of translation strategies, reader cultural schemas, and multimodal delivery formats. Furthermore, this hybrid methodological approach offers a replicable empirical framework for investigating international reception of Chinese literary classics in the digital era.