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[2].

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 Jirí Levý 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.»

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[3].

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.

Again, though, this is only half of our story. We need to know if this new colloquial usage in Japanese of teki was the source for de as a comparable particle in colloquial Chinese, or whether de entered modern baihua directly from its much earlier usage in colloquial Chinese literary texts of the Yuan and Ming periods. While twentieth-century spoken Chinese uses de almost exclusively, written vernacular texts often use de alongside the other genitive-forming particles zhi and di. Japanese has its own manner of forming the genitive, with the particle no, not the precise counterpart of teki but the two perform something more on the order of complementary, and occasionally overlapping, roles.

Most serious scholars of the modern Chinese historical experience, even those most closely wedded to statistical data, consider culture–actually, cultural differences – elemental to their considerations in research and writing. It would be almost impossible to imagine someone making the claim that study of China could be pursued without taking culture into account. Thus, the recent turn in translation studies toward a broader, more cultural appreciation of both source and target contexts segues neatly with this widespread scholarly criterion, and concerted attention toward the linguistic Sino-Japanese innovations over the past century could not have come at a better time.

Before blanket characterizations can be put forth about the nature of this borrowing – and long before we can generalize or theorize about it–we need closer examination of as many of the different routes by which the terminology of the Chinese Revolution entered the modern Chinese lexicon from Japanese as possible. We need to study the very texts in which these terms were first used, what Western concepts they were meant to translate, what they conjured up in the Japanese setting, the process by which they entered Chinese, and the images (however different or similar from Japanese) these terms gave rise to in China. I do not mean to suggest that we conduct 1000 separate studies, but we do need many separate studies for different clusters of terms.