Sinologists as Translators in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries eds. by Lawrence Wang-chi Wong and Bernhard Fuehrer (review)

With China's increasing global prominence over recent decades, there has been a rising scholarly interest in the history of China's relations with the world. The literary, intellectual, and cultural encounters between China and Europe since the early modern period have been the research focus in academic works such as One into Many: Translation and the Dissemination of Classical Chinese Literature (2003) edited by Takhung Leo Chan, and Peter Kitson's Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760-1840 (2013). Contributing to this area of research, Sinologists as Translators in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries brings the study of the history of Sinology together with translation studies "through extensive archive studies and a focus on translation hermeneutics" (xix) to examine translations of Chinese classic and literary texts by European Sinologists, revealing how China was gradually understood and represented in Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The eleven articles in the volume are from the first and the second "Sinologists as Translators in the 17-19th Centuries" International Conferences held, respectively, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2011 and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 2013. The conferences and the collection advance a distinct methodological preference for the historicized and contextualized study of translation practice. Since the theoretical and methodological paradigm shift known as the "cultural turn" in the 1990s, translation studies has begun to take cultural and historical factors into consideration. As a result, the research focus shifts from language to culture, from accessing the linguistic "faithfulness" of the translated text to the original to the understanding of the historical context in which the translation is produced. Through "historical and intellectual contextualization" (xix), the contributers to Sinologists as Translators have all made great efforts to explore the various historical and cultural factors involved in the production and reception of translation. They investigate the reasons for choosing certain Chinese texts for translation at a particular period of time, the greater historical and intellectual backgrounds in which the translation took place, the exact Chinese editions and commentaries used as the original texts, the translators' specific purposes invested in their translations, the translation strategies and hermeneutics accordingly employed, and the historical impact these translations exerted.

Drawing upon an impressively wide range of case studies, Sinologists as Translators presents a sweeping panorama of the history of literary transfer between China and Europe before the twentieth century. The eleven articles are arranged roughly in chronological order, beginning with the seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries and ending with the Sinologists of the nineteenth century. Overall, they illustrate the particularities and the changes reflected in the translation choices and strategies in the European perception and imagination of China and Chinese literature during the three centuries covered in this collection.

The first three articles look at the Jesuits' translations of Confucian and Taoist Classics. As shown in these studies, a common feature in the translations is the missionaries' attempt to integrate Christian theology with Chinese philosophical and religious notions. Examining the first complete translation of the Chinese Lunyu (Analects) in the West published in 1687, Thierry Meynard shows how the Jesuits "discovered" and accentuated a "convergence with Christianity" (31) in this Confucian canonical text in the translation to serve their own interests. Likewise, Claudia Von Collani scrutinizes the first known Western translation of the Taoist Classic Daodejing, probably rendered by the French Jesuit Jean-François Noëlas (1669-1740) in 1720, within the historical and intellectual context of Figurism in China. In a close analysis of the French Jesuit Pierre-martial Cibot's (1727-1780) translation of the Xiaojing (The Book of Filial Piety), Pan Feng-Chuan systematically investigates the translator's imperial interpretation of this Chinese text as well as the integration of Chinese and Western meanings in the translation.

Moving on to the nineteenth century, five...