1.4 Recent Translation Theory and Linguistic Borrowing in the Modern Sino-Chinese

Fascinating developments in the new field of translation studies may help us advance our understanding of the evolving vocabulary of the Chinese Revolution in the twentieth century. Indeed, there has been an unconscious theoretical convergence between translation studies outside the China field and modern Chinese cultural history. The key concept is «culture» writ large in both cases.

Translation theory has been virtually unknown in China until recent times. It is not that the Chinese historically have never been forced to confront the issue; on the whole, however, until the later decades of the nineteenth century, most of those who came to China were prepared to communicate in Chinese. The important exceptions were the nativization of the Buddhist canon and the undoubtedly extensive use of Manchu during the early decades of the Qing dynasty. Since the Western nations only tagged on to the long parade of countries coming to China over the centuries, we need to look first at the other countries of East Asia for clues about translation theory in an ideographic context. Literary Chinese was the lingua franca of the East Asian world for two millennia. Although the Japanese invented a native script as early as the tenth century, the Vietnamese in the thirteenth, and the Koreans only in the fifteenth, in all of these cases Chinese remained the primary domestic language for politics and high intellectual culture until the dawn of the twentieth century. We shall return to this issue below.

There have been several traditions of translation theory in the West. The oldest and most long-lasting of them-the transmission of holy scripture into lands in which its language was impenetrable-interestingly parallels developments in East Asia. The story of the Septuagint graphically typifies a whole conception of translation. When the community of Greek rabbis was called upon, ostensibly, to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek, seventy rabbis separately assumed the task. They reconvened to discover that all seventy Greek translations were identical. The implication is that only one true and correct-and implicitly divinely inspired-translation existed of this text and accordingly any text. The veracity is thus guaranteed if the translator is properly trained and equipped for the task. In the case of Bible translation, the translator performs a semi - divine function-working with God-to spread the holy word to those unable to master the original, for via translation they will now be assured of the equivalent experience. God may have spoken in Hebrew, but He also guided the Greek translators to the one and only possible translation of His word. By the same token, translation errors were, on occasion, regarded as blasphemy and punished accordingly.

This conception of translation bespeaks a word-by-word transmission of a text from one context into another. It was not important that the Greek rabbis merely conveyed the general meaning of the Hebrew Bible nor that they simply had the sentences more or less in the same order. The telling points were two: first, that every word was the same in all seventy translations, and second, that the unique translation was the equivalent (though not the equal) of the original Lefevere, "Translation: Its Geneology in the West," 18-20 (p. 19, paraphrasing Schleiermacher).

Despite the multilingual nature of literate culture in Europe through the turn of the nineteenth century, no specific theory of translation was forthcoming. Many would write in Latin or translate their ideas mentally from the vernacular into Latin rather than write them down in the mother tongue. Few needed translation. George Steiner has suggested one possible reason for the lack of translation theory: «The epistemological and formal grounds for the treatment of `meaning' as dissociable from and augmentative to `word' are shaky at best.» In spite of the absence of theory, translation not only continued, but was deeply intertwined with the evolution of modern languages: «The evolution of modern German is inseparable from the Luther Bible, from Voss's Homer, from the successive versions of Shakespeare by Wieland, Schlegel, and Tieck.»

Translation theory began to undergo a radical transformation in the nineteenth century, as translation began to involve a conscious manipulation to «move the author toward the reader,» to make literary texts as palatable in the target language and culture as they were in the source language and culture. This development marks the effective realization that precise translation, especially in the case of literary works, was inconceivable without regard for norms of the target language and culture. It is also cotemporal with the widespread emergence of vernaculars as literary mediums, where in the past Latin would have been more frequently employed. As people became less and less multilingual and as Latin declined in generic use, the multilingual knowledge necessary for remaining abreast of «world» literature made translation all the more crucial.

We have here the emergence of a new understanding of the relationship between source text (and perhaps author) and target text (and translator). No longer was a work worthy of translation approached as a long string of words, but as an entire text. The translator now performed the all-important function of bringing into one universe a text from another which often might have remained unknown. Without English or French translations of their work, it is highly unlikely, for example, that the writings of Ibsen or Strindberg or Kierkegaard or Tolstoy or, in more recent times, I.B. Singer would have been known outside the realm of native speakers of their mother tongues; it is inconceivable, as well, that Singer would have won the Nobel Prize.

This development has now reached the point that readers outside the native languages of such authors have ceased thinking of their writings as foreign. The same is true of the King James Bible. Translation has actually energized the target languages with new themes and genres deriving from the source languages. The phrase, «Yea, that I walk through the valley of the shadow of death» - despite the fact that it is not an entirely correct translation-has so fully entered our discourse as to make ordinary mortals believe King David spoke English.

Advances over the past two decades in translation studies have evolved from this trend. We are now in the midst of a «cultural turn.» The important unit for translation is now seen not as a series of words or sentences between languages nor even as a text moving from one setting to another. Rather they themselves are now seen as emblematic of their contexts, as cultural entities that emerge from one distinctive cultural universe. Without an appreciation of that enveloping context, translation into the target language loses much. But traditional bemoaning of what is «lost in the translation» should also not consume our efforts excessively, for there are countless instances in which translation can clarify or elucidate a cryptic original, in which the target language rises above the source language. Generations of Germans have turned to the English translations of Kant's critiques to understand them, and you have not lived until you have read Tsubouchi Shy's translations of Shakespeare: «Yo ni aru, yo ni aran. Sore ga gimon jya!»

Translators now speak not of source and target languages alone, but of source and target cultures as well, and the target culture is now beginning to loom almost as large as the source. There is as well less talk of good versus bad translations or faithful versus unfaithful ones. This particular extension of the development of translation studies has a profoundly dangerous aspect to it. In the hands of theorists influenced by postmodernist literary criticism, everything becomes relativized. All texts, translations as well as originals, emerge on an even plain. While it strikes me that there certainly is much room for nuance and uncertainty in translation, there are also certain definable criteria, if not absolutes, that must remain in play. War is not peace, and love is not hate.

Responsible members of the community of translation studies, however, are fully aware of such potential pitfalls while remaining sensitive to the new directions in their field. As Jiri Levy had noted: «A translation is not a monistic composition, but an interpretation and conglomerate of two structures. On the one hand there are the semantic content and the formal contour of the original, on the other hand the entire system of aesthetic features bound up with the language of the translation.»

The new realization, then, is that translation is not simply the transference of meaning from one language system into another with the able use of dictionary and grammar. Language is at the heart of culture; it gives voice to culture, and translators must see the source text within its surrounding cultural context. Texts have images in cultures and these are not always the same in the source and the target. Images in turn have power through language.

In this conection, Susan Bassnett-McGuire has argued: To attempt to impose the value system of the SL [source language] culture onto the TL [target language] culture is dangerous ground, and the translator should not be tempted by the school that pretends to determine the original intentions of an author on the basis of a self-contained text. The translator cannot be the author of the SL text, but as the author of the TL text has a clear moral responsibility to the TL readers.

Mary Snell-Hornby goes this one half-step further. She notes that, as we move toward an understanding of translation that sees it as more a cultural (rather than a linguistic) transfer, the act of translation is no longer a «transcoding» from one context into another, but an «act of communication.» Texts are part of the worlds they inhabit and cannot be neatly ripped from their surroundings. The new orientation in translation studies is toward the «function of the target text» rather than the «prescriptions of the source text.» Hans J. Vermeer has argued that translation is first and foremost a «crosscultural transfer.» Thus, the translator must not only be bilingual - that's a given - but effectively bicultural as well. «Translation is not the transcoding of words or sentences from one language to another, but a complex form of action, whereby someone provides information on a text (source language material) in a new situation and under changed functional, cultural, and linguistic conditions, preserving formal aspects as closely as possible.»

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