With the misgivings expressed above, I believe that the cultural turn in translation studies marks a major stride forward, and it can be especially useful to those of us trying to understand the evolution of the new vocabulary of the Chinese Revolution. We should note in passing that the identification of language with culture is elemental in East Asia where the two words share the same root. This is, of course, not to say that Chinese and Japanese cultures are the same. Especially (though not exclusively) at the elite level, however, Neo-Confucian culture-a core canon of texts, a shared tradition of commentaries on them, specific family and societal values deriving from them, and the like-had become strikingly similar in both countries from at least the seventeenth century forward. Significant differences in social organization and particularly in the procedures by which men were chosen for political decision-making jobs remained, making the Japanese and Chinese cultural contexts similar as opposed to identical, different strings on the same guitar, different variations on the same theme http://www.poetrymagic.co.uk/literary-theory/a-summing-up.html.
The Japanese descendents of these elite men of the Edo period, men from the bakumatsu (late Edo) and Meiji eras who were trained initially in the Confucian classics, would later in their careers learn Western languages and take upon themselves the formidable tasks of transmitting Western concepts into Japanese. Had it been the mid - to late twentieth century, they would surely have conveyed-as their own descendents have-the new ideas from the West into katakana expressions taken largely from English. There are two reasons for this shift: English now enjoys the reputation of an international language, and the new «coiners» lack the training in Kanbun (literary Chinese) of their forefathers. A brief trip to any electronics store in Japan will reveal just how dependent on English the new Japanese terminology is. Because these new terms are not written in Chinese characters, they cannot easily be imported (let alone reimported) into China now, as was the case with the Chinese-character compounds coined by Japanese earlier.
In the Meiji period, however, the only appropriate language for transmitting new philosophical, literary, and scientific terms was Chinese. Many of these creators of new terms were famous in their own right for composing works in literary Chinese. One of the most famous case is undoubtedly the great liberal thinker, Nakae Chmin (1847-1901), who translated Rousseau's Social Contract into Kanbun in the 1880s. Via such routes, numerous new words were coined in Chinese for the literate Japanese reading public. Because the terms then existed in Chinese ideographs, they were ready made for transport into Chinese. The second stage began roughly from the turn of the century, and, although not all terms were renativized into Chinese, the carriers were usually Chinese studying in Japan or those who had taken refuge there.
To make matters even more complicated, the Japanese coiners frequently derived their neologisms from traditional Chinese texts. The research of Sanet Keish and its further development in the research of Tam Yue-him has now documented over 1000 such terms, usually two - or four-character expressions. Many of these same terms also entered the Korean and Vietnamese languages in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Although it is not completely exceptional, an ideographic language like Chinese-and the other East Asian languages that used Chinese and developed their own vernaculars later-may require a variety of qualifications in discussing translation, either to or from. Achilles Fang overstated the case, though he raised some important considerations.
Another fetish of a group of Sinologists who still think Chinese (classical Chinese) is a «language» in the conventional sense is their firm conviction that a perfect dictionary will smooth their way. Alas, they are whoring after false gods. First, such a dictionary is impossible to make; next, what earthly use is a two-hundred-volume dictionary to anyone? After all is said and done, the meaning is determined from the context in the largest sense of the word, and there no dictionary will avail him. Moreover, a dictionary is no help if the wrong entry is chosen.
A great deal of research has been done on the entrance into Chinese and Japanese of the Meiji-period Japanese neologisms, though it remains scattered. An entire generation of intellectuals in China tried to read Yan Fu's Chinese renderings of Western concepts in his translations of Mill, Smith, Spencer, and Huxley, though most of his neologisms simply did not stick. For example, perhaps his most famous term, tianyanlun as a translation for the «theory of evolution,» was soon replaced in the new Chinese lexicon by the Japanese created term, shinkaron (Ch., jinhualun). Why such terms did not «take» in China cannot simply be stuffed off on the fact that they were too literary or assumed too profound a knowledge of classical Chinese lore. When Yan Fu was writing, there was no widespread vernacular Chinese language in use, and most of those who were able to read his translations undoubtedly understood his allusions (even if the Western ideas behind them remained partially obscured). Was Yan Fu aware of the Japanese translations by Nakamura Keiu of the same texts he labored over? Has anyone ever compared the vocabularies devised by Nakamura and Yan to render Western philosophical, political, and economic concepts?
There is a widespread, but extremely thin understanding of the process by which the abovementioned 1000 or so Japanese coinages were formed and entered Chinese. In fact, there are any number of actual, far more complex routes by which these terms were created and adopted into modern, vernacular Chinese. Sait Tsuyoshi has examined a number of fascinating cases in great detail in his major work, Meiji no kotoba (Meiji words). He is concerned primarily with how a discrete set of expressions was forged in Meiji Japanese and how it came to be part of the modern spoken and written Japanese language. Although most of the terms studied-such as Seiy (Ch. Xiyang, the West), shakai (Ch. shehui, society), kywakoku (Ch. gongheguo, republic), hoken (Ch. baoxian, insurance), and other philosophical and academic terms-also found their way into Chinese, Sait does not examine that phase of the process. He does, though, discuss many of the terms that were suggested and subsequently dropped for various Western political institutions and systems.
In a series of fascinating studies that approaches a similar topic, though largely from the Chinese side of the picture, Mizoguchi Yz looks as the numerous Chinese terms that surround the complex of issues involved in laying out the modern distinctions drawn between the public (gong) and the private (si). He begins his analysis in Chinese antiquity and demonstrates the remarkable changes that transpired in the uses to which these terms were put over time. From the late nineteenth century, however, these terms became caught up in demands by Chinese intellectuals for Western-style political institutions. China's readiness for such institutions, such as representative government or democracy, were frequently justified on putative long traditions in which, for example, the «people were the basis» of the state.
Let me conclude with one small case which should demonstrate succinctly just how thoroughly complicated this transmission process was: the particle de (J. teki), used in general to form adjectives from nouns, adverbs from adjectives, or to create the genitive case. In his unsurpassed study of the transmission of Western learning to China and Japan, Masuda Wataru (1903-77) has described part of the story in discussing the important work of Yanagawa Shunsan (1832-70). Yanagawa was a scholar of Western learning at the end of the Edo period and head of the Kaiseijo, the main center for Western studies at the time in Japan; he also reputedly knew Dutch, French, English, and German. A few biographical details about the life and work of the coiners of these neologisms may help us anthropomorphize this process; it puts flesh on the bones.
Yanagawa was also, though, a punctuator of Kanbun texts, written by Chinese or translations by Chinese of Western works. His reputation as a scholar was sufficiently formidable and well known that he appeared as a character at the very beginning of Nagori no yume (Lingering Dreams) by Imaizumi Mine (1858-1937), the daughter of Katsuragawa Hosh (1822-81), a physician to the family of the shogun and a scholar of Dutch learning. Clearly, the community of Kangaku scholars and that of Western learning scholars had significant overlap. Among his many works, Yanagawa wrote Furansu bunten (A Grammar of French), Igirisu nichiy tsgo [Everyday colloquial English], and Ygaku benran [A manual of Western Learning]; and his skills at Kanbun can be found in the literary Chinese versions of popular Japanese songs he prepared, his punctuation work on the Japanese version of the Zhihuan qimeng (The circle of knowledge), a work comprising lessons on English, Christianity, and natural science, based on James Legge's Chinese translation. Yanagawa was also involved in a project to prepare a complete Japanese translation in twenty string-bound volumes of the Gewu rumen (Introduction to science) by W.A.P. Martin.
Among the many terms nativized into Japan by Yanagawa and his associates was the aforementioned particle teki (Ch. de). In his personal recollections, tsuki Fumihiko (1847-1928) once described the group of men who worked together translating so many of these Chinese and Western texts. The group included: Yanagawa Shunsan, Katsuragawa Hosh, Kurosawa Magoshir, Mitsukuri Keigo [d. 1871], Kumazawa Zen'an [1845-1906], and even myself. Odd as it might seem, this group in general [also] enjoyed reading Chinese novels, such as Shuihu zhuan [Water margin] and Jinpingmei [Golden lotus]. One day we got together and began chatting, and someone mentioned inadvertently the following. It was fine to translate «system» as soshiki (Ch. zuzhi), but it was difficult to translate the term «systematic.» The suffix «tic» sounded similar to the character teki (de) as used in [Chinese] fiction; so why not render «systematic» as soshiki teki (Ch. zuzhi de). Everyone thought it was a brilliant idea and agreed to give it a try. Eventually, we paid someone to write out the expression soshiki teki clearly and bring it to the authorities. «Have you put this into use?» «Yes.» «This is rather extraordinary, isn't it?» «Not that I am aware, no.» We joked with these sorts of comic play-acting, but very often we were only able to escape difficult [translation] points with this character teki. Ultimately, it moved from pure invention to fact, and it was used later without a second thought, as people picked up on this usage.
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