A study of late Qing collaborative translation

Abstract

Collaborative translation is one of the most practiced modes of intercultural

communication in Late Qing as in the general history of China. While collaborative

translation, as its prevalence suggests, is expected to have a direct and significant

bearing on the way a translation is produced, little attention has been paid to the

understanding of its nature, not least its influence on the shaping of translation

products. The present study endeavors to explore collaborative translation with three

specimens of acclaimed Late Qing translation. It will show that these translations,

produced collaboratively by teams of Western and Chinese translator, are instilled

with a fusion of the collaborator’s horizons, thus rendered as a hybrid monstrous both

to the source and the target cultures.

The first part of this thesis establishes the conceptual paradigm from which a probe

into the general practices of Late Qing collaborative translation derives. It argues that

collaborative translation, which generally operates as a cooperation between a

bilingual foreign translator and a monolingual local translator, allows considerable

latitude for the local translator to participate in the transference and building of exotic

knowledge, bringing about hybridity to the translation products. Resting upon the

premise of hybridity, the second part of this thesis conducts close analyses of the

selected translations on medicine, mathematics and chemistry, namely Quanti Xinlun,

Daiweiji Shiji and Huaxue Jianyuan. By reconstructing the actual manner of

operation through which these translations were produced, and by examining how

certain fundamental concepts of modern Western sciences were rendered into

Chinese, this part forms a critical study of the agency of the Chinese translator, who,

as will be shown, selectively interprets and reshapes the body of knowledge to be

transmitted in a direction presumably unintended by his Western counterpart, thereby

creating a hybrid materialized as a blend of horizons between the two collaborators,

and in consequence a new entity of scientific concepts different from those in the

West and in China.

The purpose of this study, that is to say, is to explore the agency of translators in the

act of translation by positing collaborative translation as a site of observation, where

cultural entanglement is both theoretically and empirically conspicuous. It is hoped

that this study will on one hand foster our understanding of collaborative translation

in Late Qing, and on the other, reveal further the agency of translators in intercultural

communication.