| Missionaries entered China during the Wanli period of the Ming dynasty,and played an important role in Chinese history until the end of the Qing dynasty.In the late Ming,Chinese officials and scholars,represented by Xu Guangqi,proposed the translation of western scientific and technological classics.At that time,Chinese people had no knowledge of foreign languages and the missionaries were not good at Chinese writing.Therefore,cooperative translation was adopted as the missionaries translated the literature orally and the Chinese recorded their words in written Chinese.With the development of translation studies in China,cooperative translation of this period has gradually attracted the attention of scholars in this field and been introduced into the study of the history of interpreting.Based on this interpreting activity,the author focuses on the role and the function of the missionary interpreters.The author quotes the concepts of field,habitus and capital of Bourdieu’s sociology,and takes the interpreting activities of Matteo Ricci,Sabatino de Ursis and Gielio Aleni as examples to investigate their motivations to act as gatekeepers.There are four major findings in this study:the social field is decisive to missionary interpreters’ preference for interpreting mathematical and astronomical literatures and the suspension of this activity;the missionaries would be influenced by the cultural capital to choose other subjects in accordance with their educational background;the cultural capital and social capital are important for missionary interpreters in selecting partners;the missionary interpreters had the habitus to believe that Europe was the most developed and civilized place in the world,therefore,a lot of statements of boasting European continent were reserved in the translated works. |
