Focusing on the translation process of Urban Village Renovation, an academic translation project from the Chinese Fund for the Humanities and Social Sciences, this paper presents the translators’ behaviors in three aspects: re-conceptualizing, re-contextualizing, and empathizing. The results show that the translator re-conceptualizes culturally-loaded words and integrates them into the target culture; the translator manages to supplement target readers’ experience by annotating or rewriting the contexts; the translator taps into the cross-cultural knowledge reserves to enhance target readers’ empathy with Chinese culture. Through these translation behaviors, the translator plays an initiative role in knowledge production and dissemination as a recipient, re-constructor, and disseminator of knowledge.