Scientific And Religious Characters Of Late Qing British Missionary Medical Translations From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

Quan Ti Tong Kao by John Dudgeon,Zhi Xin Mian Bing Fa by John Fryer and Ha Shi Ti Gong Xue by Philip Cousland are three significant British missionary medical translations in the late Qing Dynasty,which introduce the knowledge of anatomy,psychology and physiology.In the late Qing Dynasty,with the purpose of reforming and developing the country,learning from the west became a tendency,of course,including learning western medicine.British missionaries played an important role in western medical communication.British missionaries hoped to spread gospels through medical communication.Because of their double identities of missionaries and translators,scientific characters and religious characters co-exist in their medical translations.The theoretical framework of this thesis is Andre Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory.Traditional translation is endowed with strong social and cultural functions.It takes on heavy responsibility of a certain political ideology,especially under the specific social and historical environment.Andre Lefevere,as a representative of the cultural school,claims that any translation is rewriting,and all rewritings will be manipulated by the dominant ideology and poetics.This thesis takes three of the British missionary medical translations as the research objects.On the basis of a systematic literature review of the Manipulation Theory,the author intends to put three medical translations into a macro scopically social and cultural background,from the perspectives of ideology and poetics,to analyze the translation methods of scientific characters,including addition,omission,recreation and selection of archaism,and the translation methods of religious characters,including addition,adaptation,explanation and selection of archaism.In this way,this thesis demonstrates that the conflicts between Chinese culture and western culture in a particular historical period determine translation methods of missionaries,that is,the manipulation of the source texts through ideology and poetics.The main purpose of British missionaries in China was spreading Christian.And medical communication was just a method of spreading gospels.However,under the specific cultural background in the late Qing Dynasty,because of political unrest,social transformation and the call of medical education,medical missionaries devoted themselves to the medical translations which had important influences on Chinese medical development and medical consciousness.Therefore,scientific characters and religious characters co-existed in British missionary medical translations and all had great influences on Chinese culture which could not be separated from each other.