China and Its Others: Knowledge Transfer and
Representations of China and the West
28 – 29 June 2008
Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre
Manchester, UK
Abstracts
1
Translating the Visual in Contemporary Chinese Poetry
Dr Cosima BRUNO
The School of Oriental and African Studies
The University of London
Abstract
Partly because of the increased use of the computer in creative writing, from the
mid-1990s onward, visual, audio and performing-arts components are being
integrated into the Chinese poetic text in an unprecedented manner.
This paper focuses on a number of poems where visual form interacts with literary
technique. It is part of a bigger research project where I explore the possibilities
offered by hypertext to translate contemporary Chinese poetry in its complexity of
different semiotic components.
I distinguish three different but not exclusive modes of resorting to the visual in
contemporary Chinese poetry: exploitation of the pictographic function of Chinese
characters to construct the poetic theme; typographical arrangement of characters to
obtain an image which works in combination with the meaning of the verbal text; use
of characters as visual components outside their meaning to achieve linguistic
abstraction.
When dealing with these kinds of texts, translators have often opted for a
non-translation. Indeed, translation of these texts presents serious challenges: how can
we translate facts and interpretations, sense and sensations between different artistic
media and between cultures?
Through an analysis of these texts and an investigation on the semiotic process
activated by their visual form, I scrutinise how other translators have dealt with
similar problems in the past and suggest possible renditions of these poems in
English.
My translation strategy is forged on the basis of the sensorial experience that affects
the translator in front of these texts. On a general level, this is meant to harmonise
translator’s psycho-perceptual response to the poem with various semiotic practices,
which give credence to the phonic, the visual, and sophisticated hybrid devices, over
the strictly linguistic.
2
Translating Kollontai and Transforming Chinese Women
Prof Hsiang-yin CHEN
Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy
Academia Sinica
Abstract
In 1928, a male Communist, Sheng Duanxian, who is later known as Xia Yang,
became the first Chinese translator of the writing of the most prominent Soviet
Bolshevik feminist Aleksandra Kollontai. Interestingly, the male Communist
translator chose the two stories ‘Liubov’ trekh pokolenii (The Loves of Three
Generations)’ and ‘Sestry (Sisters)’ instead of any other of the female author’s
political essays, reviews or critiques. The two stories were collected in the book
named Lianai zhi lu (The Road of Love), primarily targeting the Chinese female
educated readers. Such a translation strategy focusing on the factors as text type,
audience and purpose evidently influenced the translation marketing at the end of the
1920s and the beginning of the 1930s; more and more Kollontai’s works, according to
Russian original text or English and Japanese translation, were translated and
introduced to Chinese literary circles.
More importantly, the trend of translating Kollontai in the late 1920s and the 1930s
was obliquely in the relation to a purpose of Chinese Communist policy of attracting
more Chinese women to participate in the Party after Kuomintang’s purge of
Communist in 1927. Deconstructing the wave of learning Kollontai’s emancipated
female characters in the 1930s and 1940s, Kuomintang referred to Kollontai’s
prominent narration of the sexual relationship to construct a political slogan
‘Yibeishui zhuyi (An ism of a cup of water)’ ridiculing “the complicated sexual
relationship” between the Communists’ real lives in Yanan. Translating Kollontai
therefore turned out to be not a simply business among translators, publishers and
readers, but more like a struggle between the two opponent parties and the process of
identifying and resisting.
This article not only examines the evident influence of the Kollontai’s translation on
the development of modern Chinese writing and sex politics, but also clarifies the
misinterpretation, over-interpretation and misunderstanding between initiator,
translators, communicators and receivers in Soviet Russia and China in the first half
of the twentieth century. The first part of this article studies Kollontai’s discourse of
constructing Communist morality, gender awareness and national identification,
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portraying her blue print of sex politics under the Communist ideology. The second
part shows the connection between the translation of Kollontai’s writing and female
characters in Chinese texts. Furthermore, this part juxtaposes different versions based
on Russian, English and Japanese, paralleling similarities, nuances and differences to
investigate the phenomenon of misinterpretation, over-interpretation and
misunderstanding, scrutinising and challenging the existent theories of translation
studies.
4
Pseudotranslation, Gender, and Print:
Two Examples from the Late Qing
Prof Michael Gibbs HILL
The University of South Carolina
Abstract
For nearly a century, scholars have lamented the many shortcomings of
translators in the late Qing period: their lack foreign-language skills, unsystematic
choice of source texts, their blasé attitudes toward documenting their sources and
rendering quality translations, etc. In this paper, I look at how some of the most
egregious examples of “bad” translation signal larger changes in authorial and
intellectual labor at the turn of the twentieth century. I examine two texts that
“fake” – or at least blur – their status as translation and the gender of their translators
or authors: The Free Marriage (Ziyou jiehun 自由結婚, 1903), and “The Heroic
Slave-Girl” (Xia nunü 俠奴女, published in Nüzi shijie 女子世界, 1904). Put
together by at least one Chinese student in Japan, Free Marriage was an ambitious
hoax: it featured a letter from its “author,” the translator’s postal address in
Switzerland, an English-language title page, and a full set of commentaries to the text.
Indeed, through its packaging, Free Marriage appears more authentic than many other
late nineteenth-century translations that told readers nothing about the original author
or source text. The second text, “The Heroic Slave-Girl,” was a “legitimate”
translation of a story from a Japanese version of The Thousand and One Nights by
Zhou Zuoren 周作人 and Ding Zuyin 丁祖蔭. In print, however, it was presented
as the work of one “Ms. Pingyun” (Pingyun nvshi 萍雲女士). In my discussion, I
ask: How do Free Marriage and “Slave-Girl” anticipate and play to readers’
expectations about translated fiction? In what ways do they mark themselves as an
authentic foreign texts, and where do their acts of “passing” begin to unravel? At a
time when many male literati published “women’s magazines,” what is the
significance of this appropriation of the feminine in the literary labor of translation?
By approaching these and other issues, this paper will provide new ways to
understand the relation between gender and the role of translation in remaking the
material practices of intellectual culture in fin-de-siecle China.
5
The War of Neologisms: The Competition between the Newly Translated
Terms Invented by Yan Fu and by the Japanese in the Late Qing
Prof Max K. W. HUANG
Institute of Modern History
Academia Sinica
Abstract
In the late Qing, many newly translated Chinese terms invented by the Japanese were
imported into China with tremendous cultural effects. Facing this terminological
invasion, Chinese officials, scholars, and students such as Zhang Zhidong, Yan Fu,
Lin Shu, Zhang Binglin, and Peng Wenzu harshly criticized the new vocabulary.
Moreover, some Chinese scholars, especially the famous translator Yan Fu, created
new terms to replace the Japanese neologisms. This gave rise to a competition that
lasted from the late Qing to the early Republican period. Yet by the 1920s, most of the
terms with Japanese origins had been incorporated into the Chinese language at the
expense of the terms created by Yan and other Chinese.
This paper describes the competition and discusses the abandoned neologisms
invented by Yan Fu. These terms included transliterated terms such as “tuodu” (拓都
total), “yaoni”(么匿 unit), “niefu” (涅伏 nerve), “luoji” (邏輯 logic), “wutoubang” (烏
託邦, utopia), as well as newly invented translations such as “guanpin” (官品 organic),
“bule” (部勒 organization), “qunxue” (群學 sociology), “mingxue” (名學 logic), and
“tianzhi” and “minzhi” (天直、民直 rights).
Most of the terms invented by Yan fell before the Japanese neologisms. The
failure of Yan’s own neologisms was also seen in his failure to unify translated terms
when he was the head of the Office for the Compilation of Translated Terms in the
Ministry of Education. The competition between the terms invented by Yan and by the
Japanese indicates that Xun Zi’s view on “the correct use of names” is still insightful.
Xun Zi noted, “Names have no intrinsic ‘appropriateness.’ They are bound to
something by agreement in order to name it. The agreement becomes fixed, the
custom is established, and it is called ‘appropriate.’…. Names do not have intrinsic
good qualities. When a name is direct, easy, and not at odd with the thing, it is called a
‘good name.’” There were some “good names” in Yan’s translations, but unfortunately
they were not fixed by the public agreement. Nevertheless, his ways of creating new
terms revealed proper standards of translation.
6
The Translation of Ethics: the Case of Wang Guowei
Prof Joyce C.H. LIU
National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu
Taiwan
Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals were faced with rapid
and frustrating changes of contemporary political situations as well as the vast import
of European and Anglo-American thoughts. The task of translation became the
vocation of most intellectuals of the time. Wang Guowei translated a significant
amount of texts related to philosophical, psychological, educational and ethical
questions especially during 1900 to 1911. The purpose of this paper is to examine
Wang Guowei’s conceptualization of ethics in relation to the connection between the
psyche and logos in his writings and his translations. The assumption of this project is
to see Wang’s philosophical formulation of the concept of ethics not only as a
translation and negotiation between Western thoughts, especially Kant, Schopenhauer
and Schiller, and classical Chinese thoughts, but also as a revision of the concept of
social-evolutionistic ethics, under the influence of Spenserian theories, that was
prevailing at the turn of the century.
7
When the Big River Flows Toward the West:
A Case Study of the English Translation of Li Qiao’s Wintry Night
Kenneth Szu-han LIU
University College London
Abstract
Dahe xiaoshuo (big river novel) is a unique genre in the development of Taiwanese
literature. It has never played an important role in the mainstream literary production,
yet eventually becomes a significant symbol and icon for Taiwan’s identity, due to the
fact that it does not only construct the historical narratives in Taiwan, but also reflect
the consistent resistance of people in this island against their environments, both
natural and political. As an important genre to represent Taiwanese literature, dahe
xiaoshuo are not absent in the English translation. However, when such novels are
translated into another language, a few difficulties arise. First of all, since dahe
xiaoshuo normally cover a long span of time, they tend to be voluminous and
abridgement is therefore necessary. Secondly, dahe xiaoshuo is set to reflect a
specific period in history and inevitably involve historical events and details in daily
life at that time, which are not easily rendered into another culture. Moreover, the
historical consciousness in dahe xiaoshuo is often the reflection of the authors’
criticism and interpretation to the history, which challenges translators’ interpretation
of the source texts as well as the history. Last but not least, dahe xiaoshuo in Taiwan
are generally heavily loaded with political ideology, because they are written in search
of the roots with the historical mission to unveil what has happened in this island so
that people living here will have a better understanding where they come from and
where they should go. Such an ideology load always challenges the translators.
In this paper, I will take Li Qiao’s Wintry Night, translated by Taotao Liu & John
Balcom and published by Columbia University Press in the series of Modern Chinese
Literature from Taiwan, as a case study to show how the translators tackled the
above-mentioned problems. By close reading and comparison between the source text
and the target text, I will pay special attention to the questions such as how a novel
heavily loaded with cultural references and geopolitical ideology is rendered into
another language and culture, how a three-volume work is abridged into one, what has
been left out and how the abridgement affects the translation. I will argue that the
English translation tones down the historical and ideological consciousness in the
source text and hence re-presents Wintry Night not as a novel with the historical
reality but simply a novel with the exotic historical flavour.
8
Translation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in China (1956)
Elaine Yin-ling NG
University College London
Abstract
In the Communist era from 1949 to 1966 in China, foreign literature translation
served the political functions of uniting the people to fight the enemy and to construct
socialism. It was highly selective and biased towards the party. It soon became a mere
tool of “proletarian politics,” a subservient instrument for ideological propaganda, and
a collective enterprise that was organized and planned carefully under the leadership
of Mao. This resulted in the general improvement in the quality of literary translation
(Sun, 1996; Wang, 1995; Wong, 1999).
The case study looks at the translation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the
Sea, produced by Hai Guan in 1956 during the early years of Communist China. It is
the most popular work of Hemingway among all others which have been translated
into Chinese. The novella and the short story “The Undefeated” were the only two
works of Hemingway selected by the party to be translated both by Hai during that
time. The image of Santiago as an undefeated hardened man has strengthened and
enlightened thousands of Chinese people. The study explores the prominent
characteristics of Hai’s translation in the rendering of diction, verbal and modal
expressions, speech and thought presentation, and Europeanized structure – lengthy
premodifiers. It also inquires into the causes of Hai’s linguistic choices by relating the
textual features identified to the specific sociocultural and ideological contexts of
production in an attempt to draw a causal link between them.
9
“Misogyny” and the Modern Girl:
Scientific Jargon and Neosensation
Prof Hsiao-yen PENG
Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy
Academia Sinica
Abstract
This paper analyzes the scientific jargon incorporated into Mu Shiying’s 1933
story “Bei dangzuo xiaoqianpin de nanzi” (A man taken as a plaything). Medical and
psychological terms, such as “misogyny,” “autopsy,” “neurosis,” “indigestion,”
“germ,” and so on, abound in the story. Typical of neosensationist stories, these terms,
borrowed from Japanese translations of Western scientific lexicon, are used in a
tongue-in-cheek fashion to ridicule a fickle modern girl who enjoys torturing her
suitors.
On the one hand, the story reflects the mentality and speech habits of college
students in the metropolis who were well versed in the macaronic practice of language.
One the other, the loose usage of scientific terms demonstrates how, since Hu Shi’s
1917 advocacy for vernacular literature as opposed to Classical literature, the
vernacular awkwardly evolving in the 1930s resorts to vocabulary bantering with
modern scientific knowledge. Most important, the scientific jargon used freely by
characters in the story discloses how medical knowledge formulated people’s
understanding of each other’s mind and body when disciplines such as psychology
were to be established in China.
10
Text, Context, and Dual Contextualization—
A Thick Translation of Gulliver’s Travels
Prof Te-hsing SHAN
Research Fellow and Deputy Director
Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica
Adjunct Chair Professor, Providence University
Abstract
Gulliver’s Travels was first introduced into China by an anonymous
translator/rewriter in 1872 and serialized in Shen Bao, one of the earliest daily
newspapers in China, for only four days before coming to an abrupt end. Even since
then, this text has been one of the most popular translations/mistranslations in the
Chinese speaking world and has often been read as Children’s literature in a truncated
version. It is not much of a stretch to say that it is the most misunderstood text in
Chinese translation history.
In 1997, the National Science Council in Taiwan launched the Project of
Annotated Translation of Classics with an aim to introduce more classical texts and
cultural capital, and to elevate the status of translation and translators. The goal
being academic translation, the NSC established guidelines and invited scholars to
submit their projects. In order to differentiate the products of these translation
projects from others on the market, several apparatuses were required: a critical
introduction, annotations, a chronology of the original author, and references.
As a scholar-cum-translator for more than two decades, I have always been
very concerned about the task of the translator and the important role that he or she
plays. I firmly believe that in addition to translating the text proper, the translator, as
a mediator between two cultures, should better serve his/her target audience by
informing them about the reception history of a particular text, especially a classic,
not only in its source cultural context, but also in its target cultural context. The
annotated translation project of Gulliver’s Travels provides me with an excellent
opportunity to carry out my theory of dual contextualization, which is derivative of
my years of translation.
This paper, therefore, is a self-reflection of a
scholar-cum-translator whose thick translation of Gulliver’s Travels, under the
sponsorship of the NSC, is expected to provide a unique Chinese translation of this
literary classic for the first time since it was introduced to the Chinese-speaking world
in 1872.
11
Exploring the role of pseudo-translation in the history of translation:
Marryat’s Pacha of Many Tales
Dr James ST. ANDRÉ
The University of Manchester
Abstract
This paper sets out to demonstrate that pseudo-translation is an integral part of the
history of translation, at least at certain times and places. Specifically, I demonstrate
that for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pseudo-translation was
actually an important player in the contested field of translations from oriental
languages and the emergent discipline of oriental studies. Such works were part of
that field of knowledge, both at the specialist and the popular level, and helped shape
contemporary European conceptions of the orient. Drawing on the work of Gideon
Toury and Theo Hermans for theoretical justification, I use Bourdieu’s concept of the
field of literary production to examine the interaction between genuine and pseudotranslations from Chinese into English from the eighteenth to the early twentieth
centuries, focusing in particular on Sir John Francis Davis’s genuine translation, The
Sorrows of Han, and Frederick Marryat’s pseudo-translation, The Pacha of Many
Tales, which incorporates and orientalizes Davis’s translation.
12
Translation Practice Jarring with Theory:
On Qunxue siyen （群學肆言，1903）
Prof Daw-hwan WANG
Institute of History and Philosophy
Academia Sinica
Abstract
Yen Fu set up the theory of xin (fidelity), da (equivalence), ya (fluence) for
translation criticism in the preface to his first translation work, Tienyen lun (Evolution
and ethics). Popular among common readers for its comprehensiveness, it offers a
convenient scheme and a common language for critics. Yet in practice Yen Fu didn’t
follow his own theory, and he even warned that “those who should imitate my way of
translation exhibited in this work would not benefit at all from me.”
Thanks to scholars of Yen Fu, we have known a lot about the factors which
contributed to this parodox. For example, Yen Fu’s own agenda of China’s survival in
a world dominated by imperial powers played a central role in his selection of
Western works to translate. However, a comprehensive study of Yen Fu’s practice as
translator is still wanting: Tienyen lun has received too much critical attention, while
Qunxue siyen (The Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer, 1873), too little.
Considering the well-known fact that Yen Fu is a self-claimed disciple of Spencer, and
that in Tienyen lun Yen Fu constantly cites Spencer’s arguments against Huxley’s, the
lack of scholarly interest in Qunxue siyen raises intelletual curiosity.
In this paper, I would show that the distortions of Spencer’s texts in Qunxue
siyen were the result of lack of a common discourse between East and West. Yen Fu’s
navy background at home and abroad was not enough for him to absorb the
Spencerean discourse in its full panorama; his only recourse was the Classics, in
which he had been immersed for years as a Chinese intellectual, and on which he
framed his political agenda. It was unlikely that in his translation he could have
followed his own theory.
13
Translators in the Macartney Embassy to China, 1792-93
Prof Lawrence Wang-chi WONG
Nanyang Technological University
Abstract
In 1792, George Lord Macartney was sent by King George of Great Britain to
visit Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Empire. While the visit was initiated under the
pretext of congratulating the Emperor’s eighty-third Birthday, the real agenda was to
press open the tightly closed door of the great Chinese Empire. Unfortunately, this
first encounter of the two greatest powers on Earth was a complete failure. Macartney,
after meeting the Emperor briefly for two times, left empty-handed, except some
presents for King George and himself.
Much has been reported and discussed on the Macartney Embassy. People try to
identify the reasons of the failure from different angles. For a long time, the
main-stream argument has blamed Emperor Qianlong for wrongly taking the British
embassy as a traditional kind of tributary mission from inferior and uncivilized
barbarians. Hence, he laid emphasis on such trivial matters as what presents were
brought by the British and what rites were to be used to receive the embassy. His
rejection of the requests of the British has been interpreted as an opportunity lost for
China to get connected to the modern west.
The purpose of the present paper is to look into a topic that has long been
neglected: the translation activities that took place during the mission. While it is
mere common sense that translation must play a crucial part in diplomatic exchanges
between countries, there has not been any discussion at all on the topic in this first
Sino-British encounter. However, the present paper demonstrates that translation
played a vital part in the mission. By consulting first hand materials, we will first
looking into the qualifications of the translators of both sides, followed by an analysis
of their translations. Ultimately, we will determine how their performance seriously
affected the outcome of the Embassy, in particular relation to the tributary issue.
14
Transference as Narcissistic or Traumatic:
Contemporary Chinese Poets (Mis-)Translated from Their Western Predecessors
Prof Xiaobin YANG
Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy
Academia Sinica
Abstract
Almost all major Chinese poets in the post-Mao era (including Duo Duo, Yang
Lian, Hai Zi, Xi Chuan, Bai Hua, Chen Dongdong, Wang Jiaxin, Zhang Shuguang, Xi
Du, Zhang Zao, Ouyang Jianghe, Sun Wenbo, Zang Di, Xiao Kaiyu, among others)
have been enthusiastic in writing about their western (post-)modernist forerunners
(Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Yeats, Yesenin, Mayakovski, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva,
Gide, Breton, D’Annunzio, Brecht, Pound, Nabokov, Borges, Elytis, Brodsky,
Ginsberg, etc.). In a way, this can be understood as translation of the great Western
minds into the Chinese context. But if translation is etymologically synonymous to
transference, we can discover that the process of translation can also be seen as that of
transference in the psychoanalytic sense that links the Western masters (as texts) and
their Chinese followers (as readers): the latter, nevertheless, transfer back feelings
onto the former. My paper will, with the help of the Lacanian theory of transference,
examine how various attempts of the Chinese poets address, in different ways, to the
presumably authoritative Other, whom Lacan calls the “supposed subject of
knowledge” (sujet supposé savoir). The two major trends of transference I will
analyze in this paper will be: 1) identification with the Other as the ego-ideal to foster
a narcissistic, albeit deceptive, urge for recognition that is expected to construct a new
cultural subjectivity; and 2) transformation of the Other into an objet petit a as the
way to invoke the ever-eluding desire and approach the traumatic core of the
impossibility of identification or self-identity, a sensibility deeply embedded in the
cultural symbolic in contemporary China.
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