Domestic Studies Review On The Translations Activities By The Late Qing Protestant Missionaries

Translation activities by the late Qing Protestant missionaries, regardless of “doingmissionary work with science and technology” or “cultural invasion” for the purpose, has apositive impact on Sino-western cultural exchange and China’s modernization process inoutcomes. On one hand, the effects of translation activities by the late Qing Protestantmissionaries, whether in scale, scope or on contribution to the development of Chinesesociety, are larger and higher and greater than ever. Their translation and introduction of theWestern Learning affected Chinese politics, economy, culture and military, but also producedactive influence over the Sino-western relations and cultural exchange at that time. TheWestern Learning was spread, cultural exchange between China and the West was promoted,the people was enlightened, and Chinese began to open eyes to the world, then Chineseintellectuals took over the baton from the missionaries and started initiative translation anddissemination of the Western Learning, which served as a prelude to China’s modernization.On the other hand, the missionary translators who had translated Chinese excellent works intothe western languages and introduced them to the West gave birth to and promoted thedevelopment of Sinology, some of them, such as Samuel Wells Williams and James Legge,were famous scholars engaged in the earlier sinological study.The study on the translation activities by the missionaries is a branch of research ontranslation history, domestic scholars have generally divided it into two periods, one is aboutthe study in the late Ming and early Qing, the other about the study in the late Qing Dynasty.At the end of Ming Dynasty and the beginning of Qing Dynasty, the Jesuits like Matteo Ricciwere the protagonists of the translation activities, Later on Protestant missionaries became theabsolute main force in the late Qing Dynasty. Relatively speaking, measured by the number ofpublished papers, domestic scholars paid more attention to the study on the translationactivities by the Jesuits. Studies on translation activities by Protestant missionaries are notoptimistic either in the number of books or the number of papers published, and previousresearch methods of the translation activities by the Protestant missionaries are more limitedto traditional qualitative research in which description is taken as the primary means.In recent years, scholars such as Mu Lei, Xu Jun and Lan Hongjun came to realize andstressed that the study of translation history can learn from the study experience ofneighboring disciplines, and can be quantified. The bibliometrics employs mathematical andstatistical methods, by means of the number of the various features of the literature, todescribe, evaluate and predict the status and development trend of science and technology. Itis one of the specialized methods in Library and Information Science. Later, the bibliometricshas gradually been used to the description, evaluation and prediction of the development inother disciplines. Scholars such as Xu Jun and Zhu Yubin summarized, in theory, the newmethods of the study on the translation history, in which the analytical method of bibliometrics was included. Based on mathematical and statistical methods, the main featureof this new kind of method about historical research is quantitative study, different from thequalitative research based on description which the traditional historians adopted. This kind ofmethod can be more persuasive to the organization of the historical materials, as well as moresystematic. And in practice, scholars like Yuan Liangping and Zhu Jianfei have begun toapply the analytical method of bibliometrics to the translation studies, Xiao Qi also made asimple statistical analysis of the articles involved in translation history of the late QingDynasty by using this method. In general, however, this research method is not widelyapplied, and not to a deep extent. And its application in the study of the translation activitiesby the Protestant missionaries has rarely been explored.With the Chinese Journal Full-text Database (CJFD) of CNKI as the statistical source,this thesis uses the analytical method of bibliometrics to do some statistical analysis on thearticles published at home before the year of2011about the translation activities by the lateQing Protestant missionaries in five aspects, which are, the year of publication of each relatedarticle and the number of the related articles published in each year, the academic journals therelated articles received and published, the authors of the related articles, references of therelevant articles, and the research themes of the related articles. Meanwhile, this thesiscombines the method of qualitative analysis to do some qualitative analysis on the contents ofthe retrieved articles by means of close reading, and the result is compared with that of thequantitative analysis.Using configured retrieval types to search in CNKI,769related articles with significanceof academic study are finally retrieved after eliminating unrelated articles and those paperswhich are relevant but belong to special reports, book reviews, interviews or academicconferences reviews etc. from the findings. Through statistics and analysis of the relatedarticles, it is confirmed that the whole of the published articles on the scientific research of acertain subject, to a certain extent, reflects the research status and development trend in thefield, on the basis of above confirming this thesis summarizes the domestic research status,hotspots, development trend and existing problems on the translation activities by the lateQing Protestant missionaries; it is confirmed that the analytical method of bibliometrics whichis based on mathematical and statistical methods can be used to study the translation activitiesby the late Qing Protestant missionaries. In other words, the analytical method ofbibliometrics can be used for the study of translation history, broadening its vision, andexpanding its scope and means. Through the contrast of the results of quantitative analysisand qualitative analysis, it can be seen that a better application effect can be achieved bycombining the two methods together.