"Like Kissing through a Handkerchief": Traduttore Traditore

Despite the fact that there is much we could learn from one another, one of the sharpest and most unfortunate divides in the China studies profession is the one separating humanists from historical linguists. Few historians have seen the need to attempt to penetrate the universe of linguistics, and by the same token few historical linguists have made the effort to interact with other humanists. As a result, when historians and literary scholars have broached the theme of translation and the emergence of the modern Chinese lexicon, as they have in recent years, their work as a rule sorely belies this glaring lacuna.¹ We are still trapped within a series of vague notions of the Chinese language being ineffably transformed by hundreds and thousands of Japanese coinages of Meiji-era vintage and their overseas Chinese users, but how each of these many terms "became Chinese," to use the currently popular phrase, and helped form the modern Chinese language remains a critical desideratum. Federico Masini's extremely important The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution Toward a National Language (1993)² should have begun to change all this, but its publication in an obscure place and ignorance of his fascinating findings by most scholars have led to our general understanding not being advanced.

Among other things, Masini demonstrated that many of the terms we have long believed to have entered the Chinese language via Meiji neologisms in fact had earlier been coined by Western missionaries—Catholic and Protestant alike—when they translated Western works of importance into Chinese. Because these works did not circulate widely in China but did so more extensively in Japan, these many terms frequently did not catch on in China, but they often did come to the attention of Japanese intellectuals responsible for "coining" new kanji terms to translate Western scientific and humanistic expressions in the Meiji era. Chinese students and publicists in Japan frequently assumed that these terms were Japanese creations and adopted them into Chinese, often uncritically.

Even if we focus on the latter half of this process, the transition from Japan to China, we still need numerous micro-studies of how, when, where, and why each of these terms "made the trip." In recent essays, for example, Mori Tokihiko of Kyoto University looks at Liang Qichao's great reluctance to adopt the term jingji (Jpn: keizai) as a translation for "economy," "economics," or "political economy," even after living in Japan, where it had been widely used for years, because he felt the classical connotations behind the term—its root in the ancient term jingshi jimin, meaning "to manage the realm and save the people"—would confuse his well-educated readers. Because his competitors for readership among the expatriate Chinese community in Japan, the revolutionaries, were considerably less well educated in the classical Chinese heritage, this overlay of meaning in no serious way posed a conflict for them, and they readily adopted jingji. Ultimately, Liang hesitantly and reluctantly, but never consistently, fell in line.³

Tokens of Exchange is comprised of fourteen essays and an introduction by the editor, Lydia Liu. Given this volume's subtitle, one would assume that the essays engage the topic of translation as a linguistic issue. Some in fact do, although reference to the immense body of literature, theoretical and otherwise, in the burgeoning field of translation studies is essentially absent here, and none of the authors demonstrates an empathetic sense of the overall phenomenon of translation from inside the process. There is the equally plausible alternative that Liu and her collaborators are not interested in translation as this term is ordinarily used. Instead, they may be using it metaphorically as a form of exchange in one of many different media. Liu never informs us as to which sense of "translation" is being utilized here, so we must assume both—if only in fairness to...