0.1.2 Translation studies in China

In China,the 20th century also witnessed a flourish of Translation Studies.Numerous articles appeared in various journals and attempts have been made to make translation studies a discipline of its own right.Huang Long published his Translatology in 1988,a pioneering book in Translation Studies in China,discussing not only written translation,but also oral interpretation and machine translation.Liu Miqing published his Modern Translation Theories in 1990,another pioneering book trying to give a comprehensive theoretical account of translation.Chen Fukang published his A Chronicle of Chinese Translation Theories in 1992,an early attempt at a systematic reflection on Chinese translation theories.

Yet,with the ongoing process of globalization,translation studies scholars in China were,for quite a while,engaged more in “listening” to the whistling of the West wind from the field of Translation Studies than “thinking” in their own way.Xu Jun and Mu Lei(2009)point out that many researches on translation studies in China,are just the introduction,justification and application of the Western translation theories,short of critical inquiry into those foreign theories.This is largely because we have been greatly influenced by foreign translation theories.Earlier in 1984,we read Nida On Translation by Tan Zaixi,books of Peter Newmark in photograph and so on.Then there were Jin Di and Nida's On Translation and articles introducing the Western linguistic theories of translation.At the turn of the century,we read Liao Qiyi's Studies on Contemporary Western Translation Theories(2000),mainly introductory,and Shen Yuping's Selected Western Translation Theories(2002).Publishing houses such as Shanghai Foreign Language and Education Press and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press published series of works in Translation Studies abroad helping the publicity of the Western translation theories.

However,with the coming of the new epoch and especially with the rapid development of China's society and economy,translation studies scholars in China began to gain more and more cultural confidence.The new century ushered a new stage featured by digesting and critical thinking of those foreign theories of translation and establishing our own theories.There were efforts made to compare traditional Chinese translation theories with those in the West,to rethink and reinterpret plenty of our traditional translation theories and even try to establish schools of our own.Collections of essays in Translation Studies were published and monographs came out at a speed much faster than one can follow.And the last two decades actually witnessed a wake of the awareness of not losing our voices in the circle of Translation Studies worldwide with the implementation of the initiative“going global of the Chinese culture”.Liu Zhongde published his Studies on Western Translation Theories in 2002.Zhang Boran and Xu Jun(2002)complied a memoir entitled Translation Studies Facing the New Century which contains a number of articles comparing the Western theories with the Chinese ones.In 2003,Xun Jun published his On Translation making a fairly comprehensive discussion on almost every aspect of translation.Liu Miqing(2005)published his A Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Translation Theories giving a systematic comparison between the two and criticizing some of the tendency to underestimate Chinese translation theories.Chang Nam Fung(2004)published his A Critical Study of Chinese and Western Translation Theories,offering us some insightful comments on the functionalist approach and the cultural approaches in the West,pointing out not only some of our misunderstanding of the related theories but also some shortcomings of the discussed theories and some improvements that can be made.Tan Zaixi(2005)published his Translation Studies,with one of its chapters focusing on the comparison of Western and Chinese translation theories.Lv Jun and Hou Xiangqun(2006)published their Translatology—A Constructivist Perspective of Translation Study carrying out a paradigmatic approach to Translation Studies and trying to establish a new paradigm featured by social constructivism.To be more exact,it is Lv Jun(2001)who has pioneered the constructivist translatology in light of Thomas Kuhn's paradigm theory and with Jurgen Habermas' Universal Pragmatics as the philosophical foundation of his study.In the following years,Hou Xiangqun joined Lv Jun's study in illustrating the constructivist paradigm based on a critical review of the previous paradigms.As this paradigmatic approach can give us a better understanding of the overall Translation Studies,the authors think it necessary to introduce it here.

According to Lv Jun and Hou Xiangqun(2006),there have been some paradigmatic changes in Translation Studies in China.The first is labeled “philologist”paradigm.In this paradigm,the intention of “the author” is absolutely authoritative and divine,and can be traced and obtained by the reader.Translators as well as critics turn to every clue of the author,everything concerning the author,the autobiography,the life experience,the historical background and even the author's correspondence with his or her friends,should be studied to ensure a sound translation.The second paradigm is closely associated with structuralism in linguistics and therefore can be called the “structuralist” paradigm,with analytic philosophy as its philosophical basis.In this paradigm,the authoritative position of “the author” gives way to “the text”and “language” which is the material of a text.Rules of language shift or transfer and the interior laws of the text become the foundation of interpretation,translation and criticism alike.Translation and criticism of this paradigm seems more convincing and more objective compared with the first paradigm as “the text”,unlike “the author”,is always “there” as a substantial object.It seems that all those problems in translation can be solved through linguistic analyses: structural analysis,semantic analysis and contrastive analysis.

The third paradigm appears with another trend of the “linguistic turn” in the field of philosophy,taking an ontological view of language rather than an instrumental view.What more directly influences and makes the third paradigm dominant is modern hermeneutic philosophy which argues that meaning and understanding or interpreting can only come from the dialogue between the reader and the text.Modern hermeneutics not only overthrows the monarchy position of “the author”,but that of“the text” by deconstructing language which is traditionally regarded as an effective tool for the production,interpretation and analysis of meaning.Gadmer's concept of“fusion of horizons” undermines the “indeterminacy” of meaning.The neographism“Différance” coined by Derrida indicates that language generates meaning through the “play of Différance”.Meaning cannot precede différance,and therefore,there does not exist any pure,totally unified origin of meaning.From a deconstructive point of view,meaning is not a prior presence expressed in language.It therefore cannot be extracted from one language and transferred into another.Pursuing meaning is not a matter of “revealing” some hidden presence that is already “there” in “the text” or with “the author”.The traditional theory of meaning has failed to capture this crucial point(Davis 2004).Those different approaches to translation with the “cultural turn”all belong to this third paradigm as they share the same theoretical foundation—poststructuralism and deconstructionism and question the notion of “originality” and reverse the traditional hierarchical relation between the source text(ST)and the target text(TT).They do not believe there is the “original” meaning and hold that the term“equivalence” in translation is problematic and even,should be discarded.

In the last two decades,we could find some of the translation theories put forward by Chinese scholars were gaining international influence.For instance,the Eco-translatology proposed by Hu Gengshen at the turn of the century has proved to be a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary eco-paradigm,which has attracted many scholars from different countries,providing “a new epistemological perspective and methodological path for the study of translation theories and translation practice”(Hu Gengshen 2021:1-6).

Speaking of Translation Studies in China,we must not forget that some largescale parallel corpora have been built enabling us to carry out researches which were impossible before.Translation Studies is also becoming more and more interdisciplinary with socio-cultural approaches as the dominant trend.

Though many scholars in China are familiar with Western translation theories,and some of them even proposed their own approaches,for example,the “translator behaviour criticism” by Zhou Lingshun,yet,there has not been enough dialogue between Chinese scholars and their Western colleagues because many of their researches are written in Chinese and published in China.

The above-mentioned works are only a small part of the achievements made by Chinese scholars.There are,needless to say,many other scholars who have made their contribution to the development of Chinese Translation Studies.