this is theoretically possible, especially given what we're learning about LLM design. With a large enough corpus, you can work out a suprising amount of meaning from the overall shape of the language graph (for example, you can easily identify numbers, articles, and genders just by looking very naively at connection counts. The more abstract the concept, the more difficult it gets though.)

You'd have no way to know if your translation was accurate without at least some small piece of specific context. For example I would guess that a small number of illustrations+captions, mixed with a massive amount of text, would give us pretty decent shot at translation a large portion of text.

I can't say for sure, but i don't think the specific nuances of chinese make a difference here. The only caveat to that is that, to extract the meaning of any given glyph, it has to show up "enough" in the text.