Studies on fiction translation in China are in the ascendant. As a crucial approach to advancing national cultural publicity, enhancing cultural soft power, deepening exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations, fiction translation serves as a key carrier for implementing national strategies such as the “Going Global” of Chinese culture. Fiction translation tallies with the goal of building a great modern socialist country in terms of culture as outlined in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan. Based on bibliometric and visual analysis supported by CiteSpace 6.3.R1, this paper takes 316 articles from A Guide to the Core Journal of China (GCJC) and Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) source journals retrieved from China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) between 1996 and 2024 as research objects, to systematically sort out the evolution and the present of fiction translation research in China. The findings reveal that domestic fiction translation research has undergone three phases: the initial exploration phase (1996-2005), the steady growth and fluctuation phase (2006-2016), and the post-peak adjustment phase (2017-2024). Cooperation among authors and institutions is generally loose, with core research forces concentrated in universities with intensive disciplinary resources. Research hotspots focus on theories and methods of fiction translation, modern fiction translation, translation of specific types of fictions, and interdisciplinary research. Current limitations include insufficient cooperation, monotonous research objects and inadequate interdisciplinary integration. By visually presenting the research ecology of this field, this paper sheds light on the further deepening and expansion of fiction translation research in China.
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