Cross-border And Imagine

A missionary is of course someone who propagates religious tenets by profession. Nevertheless, in the period from about the First Opium War to the 1898 Reform Movement in China, quite a number of protestant missionaries, while preaching, chose to take part in long-term and large-scale secular cultural activities, of which translating was the regular one all the while. The scholars and experts at home and abroad have conducted abundant studies about protestant missionaries in the 19^th-century China and have yielded many discoveries. Yet further study is needed. First of all, the study of protestant activities and that of their translating activities overlaps on the one hand, but differ fundamentally on the other. Most works on protestant missionaries either just overlooks their translating activities in China or just concentrating on recording the translating events or reporting the contents of the translated works, rarely probing into the literary and cultural significance of the translating action itself. In other words, the translating activities of the protestant missionaries have not yet been taken as an independent research field in its own right. Next, most works in which the missionary translating activities are involved are based on an old-fashioned notion of translation in which translation is tacitly treated as nothing but a technical operation of words and sentences. Even in many works exclusively on Chinese translation history, such a notion is also very revealing. Moreover, it is not infrequent that the works on Chinese translation history simply adopt the conceptual framework and terminology of the general historiography, only to fail to reveal the characteristics of the translation program itself.Bearing these in mind, the author of this dissertation attempts to take as an independent research field the translation programs of protestant missionaries in in the 19rh-century China by checking them against the theoretical framework of the contemporary translation studies, and that of medio-translatology in particular. Based on the old and new materials discovered about the protestant translation programs, this dissertation combines the general description of the missionary translation programs in this period with case studies, integrating historical narration into theoretical analysis. Besides, it tries to discuss why and how these translation programs developed, their concrete process and the specific considerations in the actual translating practice. On the whole, this dissertation aims at revealing the easily neglected but important relations between the missionary translation programs and the transformation of the Chinese thoughts and culture in modern China.Besides introduction and conclusion, this dissertation consists of four chapters. Like most translation history works, the first chapter lists the translation events and translated works, but unlike those works, it introduces the bilingual dictionary compilation by the protestant missionaries. In doing so, the first chapter is an answer to the question of "what was translated then?" Chapter II focuses on such key factors that influence the translating activities as the translator's motives, their patronage, the norms of the Chinese poetics in Late Qing Dynasty and the knowledge structures of the translators. In this way, such questions as "why to translate?", "for whom the translation is made?" and "who is translating" are discussed. Chapter III concentrateson the specific strategies adopted by the missionary translators and their Chinese assistants, with the Chinese version of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 as a case study. In terms of translation studies, this chapter solves the problem of "how to translate?". Chapter IV deals with the issue of the influence of the missionary translation programs on the modern Chinese thoughts and culture.In all, this dissertation has expounded or attempts to expound the following points:First, in the perspective of cultural school of contemporary translation studies instead of the general historiography, this dissertation for the first time takes the protestant missionary translation programs as an exclusive object of research, opening an avenue for a new mode of translation history writing.Second, although the missionary translators were actually very purposeful in their translation programs, that is, to Christianize the Chinese in a roundabout way, yet they failed to achieve this goal. In other words, the Chinese readers of their translations rarely accept their religion but take the secular knowledge and concepts conveyed in these works. The discrepancy between the intention of the missionary translators and the effect of the translations on the receivers is not only a vivid proof of the unavoidable creative treason in the interlingual translating activities, but also a prefiguration for the future development of the Chinese intellectual trend.Third, translation as a concept suggests transgression, or to be concrete, boundary-crossing, crossing the boundary of language and culture. With their religious background and alienation from their motherlands, the missionary translators have to cross more boundaries, either intellectually or physically. On the other hand, with their preoccupation and pre-understanding, the Chinese readers of the missionary translations actually got something either different from its western original or from the Chinese tradition, something reshaped and reborn. In this sense, the Chinese thoughts and culture is endowed with a translative quality, a kind of effect history of translation.Finally, gradually and insistently, translations and translation programs became a hot topic among the liberal Chinese scholars and officials, who either suggests understanding the foreign affairs by translating foreign books, establishing language schools, or criticizing the inadequacy in selecting originals by the missionary translators, or making proposals to what should be translated, and so on. Their concerns with translation was in fact an expression of anxiety of foreign forces and a hope for national prosperity and military strength. This trend of talking about translation by the Chinese intellectuals was in fact something of a discursive practice in Foucaultian sense. In this vein, this dissertation proposes a new proposition, namely the "translation discourse of the Late Qing Dynasty", for future studies in this respect.