Publisher Description

Publisher Description

Chinese Translation Studies in the 21st Century, which presents a selection of some of the best articles published in the journal Perspectives in a five-year period (2012-2017), highlights the vitality of Translation Studies as a profession and as a field of enquiry in China. As the country has gradually opened up to the West, translation academic programmes have burgeoned to cater for the needs of Chinese corporations and political institutions. The book is divided into four sections, in which authors explore theoretical and conceptual issues (such as the connection between translation and adaptation, multimodality, and the nature of norms), audiovisual translation (including studies on news translation and the translation of children’s movies), bibliographies and bibliometrics (to assess, for example, the international visibility of Chinese scholars), and interpreting (analyzing pauses in simultaneous interpreting and sign language among other aspects). The book brings together well-established authors and younger scholars from universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. The chapters in this book were originally published in various issues of Perspectives: Studies in Translatology.

This work subjects James Legge's Confucian translations to a postcolonial perspective, with a view of uncovering the subtle workings of colonialist ideology in the seemingly innocent act of translation. The author uses the example of Legge's two versions of the 'Zhonguong' to illustrate two distinctive stages of his sinological scholarship.

This book explores the challenges of translating Chinese works, particularly premodern ones, for a contemporary Western readership. Reacting against the "cultural turn" in translation studies, contributors return to the origin of translation studies: translation practice. By returning to the time-honored basics of linguistics and hermeneutics, the book inquires into translation practice from the perspective of reading and reading theory. Essays in the first section of the work discuss the nature, function, rationale, criteria, and historical and conceptual values of translation. The second section focuses on the art and craft of translation, offering practical techniques and tips. Finally, the third section conducts critical assessments of translation policy and practice as well as formal and aesthetic issues. Throughout, contributors explore how a translation from the Chinese can read like a text in the Western reader's own language.

Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, Ruth Rogaski reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogaski focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng—which has been rendered into English as "hygiene," "sanitary," "health," or "public health"—as it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted from Chinese cosmology to encompass such ideas as national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of races: categories in which the Chinese were often deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike.

This volume offers a critical analysis of one the most ambitious editorial projects of late Victorian Britain: the edition of the fifty substantial volumes of the Sacred Books of the East (1879-1910). The series was edited and conceptualized by Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900), a world-famous German-born philologist, orientalist, and religious scholar. Müller and his influential Oxford colleagues secured financial support from the India Office of the British Empire and from Oxford University Press. Arie L. Molendijk documents how the series has become a landmark in the development of the humanities-especially the study of religion and language-in the second half of the nineteenth century. The edition also contributed significantly to the Western perception of the 'religious' or even 'mystic' East, which was textually represented in English translations. The series was a token of the rise of 'big science' and textualized the East, by selecting their 'sacred books' and bringing them under the power of western scholarship.