It is our great pleasure to announce a new series for the Journal of Translation Studies. Published jointly by the Department of Translation and The Chinese University Press, the journal was launched in 1997 under the editorship of Professor Serena Jin and later handed over to Professor Gilbert C. F. Fong. We take over the editing from Professor Chan Sin-wai, who recently retired. The new series will be published twice-yearly, in June and December, and is bilingual.

Over the past two decades, the Journal of Translation Studies (JTS) has striven to publish high-quality articles in both English and Chinese on a wide range of topics in translation studies. Naturally, many of the articles treat some aspect of Chinese-English, English-Chinese translation. Just in terms of literature, the coverage ranges from the translation of literary masterpieces from Chinese to English, for example Dream of the Red Chamber, and English to Chinese, as in Pope’s Essay on Man, to the translation of contemporary Hong Kong popular fiction and the reception of Chinese poetry among the beat generation in America. Other notable text types that have received special attention include legal translation and scientific translation. On the technical side, the journal has featured articles on terminology management, bilingual dictionaries, transliteration, and bibliographical studies.

There have also been Chinese contributions to translation theory, discussing the role of Yan Fu, the issue of loyalty in Chinese translation discourse, a discussion of Qian Zhongshu’s concept of huajing 化境 (sublimation), and essays on the translation of multilingual texts. Notable overseas contributors have included Eugene Nida, Peter Newmark, Douglas Robinson, Theo Hermans, Dorothy Kenny, Christiane Nord, Juliane House, Edwin Gentzler, and Sherry Simon, while locally scholars from various universities have contributed, including Serena Jin, Laurence K. P. Wong, Lawrence Wang-chi Wong, Gilbert C. F. Fong, Chang Nam Fung, Sun Yifeng and Leo Tak-hung Chan.

Today, as JTS enters its third decade, we begin with a special issue on Chinese-English, English-Chinese translation up to the close of the nineteenth century. These papers come out of a conference organized jointly by Professor Bernhard Fuehrer and Lawrence Wang-chi Wong held at SOAS in 2013, but we will let Professor Fuehrer, who has kindly agreed to act as guest editor of these papers, introduce them to our readers.

While the journal has a special focus on the history, theory and practice of Chinese-English, English-Chinese translation, it also publishes high-quality articles on research regarding other language combinations and/or theoretical aspects of translation. Submissions of up to 15,000 words in English or 20,000 characters in Chinese are welcome; please see the style sheet at the end of the volume for more details.

After publishing a first bundle of papers on this project in Sinologists as Translators in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, we take great pleasure in making available a further six papers from our “Sinologists as Translators” project in this special issue of the Journal of Translation Studies 翻譯學報.¹ This project culminated in two conferences. The first “Sinologists as Translations in the 17th to 19th Centuries” conference was organized by the Research Centre for Translation at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and held at CUHK in October 2011. A follow-up conference was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in June 2013 under the same title but with an additional focus on “Archives and Context.” Early drafts of the papers published here were presented at the second conference at SOAS in London.²

In recent years, the famous Jesuit translation of three of the Four Books, the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687), has been the subject of a number of major contributions by Thierry Meynard whose paper here focuses on the Jesuits’ understanding and translation of the Zhongyong 中庸.³ Meynard discusses the problems encountered by the Jesuit translators who had to balance philological and philosophical requirements against the intellectual foundations of missionary strategies, while at the same time achieving their goal to unfold a Confucian spirituality in the light of Zhang Juzheng’s 張居正 (1525–1582) lectures on the Four Books which functioned as their exegetical guide within the Chinese tradition.

Since the acquisition of the Manning Archive by the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland in 2015, we have access to substantial material that fills in gaps in our knowledge of the activities of the early British explorer Thomas Manning (1772–1840), his travels to China, India and Tibet, his endeavours to master the Chinese language, to act as an interpreter, and to establish Chinese language teaching in Britain. With plenty of references to material in this archive, Lawrence Wang-chi Wong retraces the activities of one of the widely overlooked figures in early Sino-British relations.

Techniques and practices of nineteenth century Anglophone translators are often discussed with reference to examples such as whether zongjiao 宗教 is a suitable translation for “religion” or whether yi 夷 should be read as “barbarian” or simply as “foreigner.” Focusing on translations into Chinese, T. H. Barrett looks at Anglophone translators, including their options in the target language and the choices they took, their readings of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, their preferences for and familiarity with diverging versions of the Bible, and the way in which they engaged with terminological precedents in Chinese literary and religious material, and scholarly traditions in China.

Largely using archive material, Niki Alsford and Bernhard Fuehrer trace the life of the Scottish missionary Carstairs Douglas (1830–1877) from Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire, to Amoy (Xiamen 廈門) where he became one of the leading figures of the local mission, and where he died of cholera and was buried at the foreign cemetery on Gulangyu 鼓浪嶼.⁴ Alsford and Fuehrer also provide an evaluation of the pioneering dictionary of the Amoy dialect of Southern Hokkien (Minnanyu 閩南語) by Douglas, a trusted reference work and linguistic guide that quickly established itself as a vademecum for missionaries in Fujian and on Taiwan.

Uganda Sze-Pui Kwan discusses the role of George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859) as an unassuming patron of Chinese Studies in Britain. She emphasizes his commitment and contributions to establishing the first Chinese programmes in England, and to setting up professorships in Chinese at University College London and at King’s College London. Heavily based on archive work, this paper sheds light on Staunton’s role in early attempts to establish institutionalized Chinese Studies in England, and the lack of support he and his plans received from the British Empire.

Having worked on the Yijing 易經 for many years, Richard J. Smith discusses the debates in Europe and East Asia on the Western origins of Chinese civilization, a hypothesis emphasised by Albert Étienne Jean-Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie (1845–1894) in his work on the Yijing and elsewhere. In addition to examining Terrien de Lacouperie’s reading of the Yijing, Smith explores the reception of his hypothesis (or parts of it) in Japan and China and how these ideas were instrumentalized by Chinese intellectuals from the early 1900s onwards.

Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange who made possible the conference at SOAS in 2013 with a generous grant. I also wish to thank the editors and staff of the Journal of Translation Studies for their patience with these papers. Without their unfailing support and assistance, the publication of these six papers in the current format would not have been possible.

1 For those papers and further information on the project see Lawrence Wang-chi Wong and Bernhard Fuehrer (eds.), Sinologists as Translators in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2016).

2 With the exception of Lawrence Wang-chi Wong’s paper on Manning, which was first presented at the “Translators in the Making of Chinese Translation History: The First International Conference on Chinese Translation History” on 17–19 December 2015 at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

3 In addition to his various papers on this subject, Thierry Meynard’s two most notable monographs on the early Jesuit translations are Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687): The First Translation of the Confucian Classics (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2011) and The Jesuit Reading of Confucius: The First Complete Translation of the Lunyu (1687) Published in the West (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

4 Although there has been increased interest in the local history of Gulangyu Island in recent years, neither the journal Gulangyu yanjiu 鼓浪嶼研究 nor the book series Gulangyu lishi wenhua xilie 鼓浪嶼歷史文化系列, appears to carry any major contribution on Douglas and his activities as a missionary or as a lexicographer of Southern Hokkien.

Abstract

In their encounter with China, the Jesuits developed a multi-layer approach, and the religious, philosophical and political layers of this encounter are quite well known. However, the spiritual encounter is less known, and yet quite important because it deals with the most inner layer of the personal identity of the Jesuits and of the Chinese people. The Italian Jesuit Prospero Intorcetta was intellectually deeply influenced by the spiritual encounter between the two traditions of Western Christianity and Confucianism as shown in his Latin translation of the Zhongyong, published in 1687.

Abstract

The arrival of educated Protestant diplomats and missionaries in China in the early nineteenth century did not only bring new modern languages into contact with Chinese. The mistranslation “Barbarian Eye” may reflect a knowledge of a similar term in the Ancient Greek of Aristophanes, while the Bible was translated not from Latin or English but from the original languages, including New Testament Greek. The English word “religion” in the Authorized Version New Testament was therefore translated variously into Chinese by successive English speakers from Robert Morrison onward not in its modern English meaning, but in the meaning of the underlying Greek. But such difficult choices concerning key words in religious discourse were not being made for the first time: translators from Prakrit to Greek and from Prakrit to Chinese had long before confronted similar issues. Nor were they made in isolation from other translation challenges, such as deciding on the rendering of the word “superstition.”

Abstract

Described by Charles Lamb as “a man in a thousand,” Thomas Manning developed a very strong interest in China at a time when there were less than a handful of British who had studied Chinese. Through different means and channels, he learned the Chinese language, and then went to Canton (Guangzhou), Hué in Annam (Vietnam), and Calcutta to look for an opportunity to enter inland China. Between 1807 and 1816, he occasionally translated for the East India Company in Canton. In 1811, he successfully reached Lhasa, Tibet, being the first British ever to reach this sacred place. A keen advocate for an embassy to Peking, he went as far as writing to King George III to urge him to send one. He claimed that he should be enlisted because his proficiency in Chinese had surpassed that of all Europeans. He was appointed one of the four translators when the Amherst Mission was finally sent in 1816. After the mission, he brought two Chinese to London, with a plan to teach some British to learn Chinese there before they went to China. Despite his legendary life, Manning has not been much studied by historians of Sino-British relations. Based on newly available materials, the present paper examines the life of this “eccentric” genius, redrawing his unique and uneven path as a Sinologist in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Abstract

This paper traces the life and achievements of the Scottish missionary Carstairs Douglas (1830–1877), especially his contributions to the mission in Amoy (Xiamen 廈門). It also includes a contextualized description and evaluation of his dictionary of the spoken language of Amoy (1873), a reference work that may still be used with some benefit by students of the Southern Hokkien (Minnanhua) language.

Abstract

The British Empire was a latecomer in establishing Chinese studies. British Sinologists made strenuous efforts to establish the first program at the University College London in the mid-1830s. The empire did not contribute to the making of it. University College London, the institution where the program was set up, was apathetic about the whole establishment. When the first term ended, University College London was unwilling to continue the program despite the clamor for learning Chinese in the society. The program was finally revived in 1846, only this time at another college at the University of London. Relying on an extensive amount of private and public archival records centering on Sir George Thomas Staunton, this paper demonstrates that it was under his patronage that the Chinese program was reinstitutionalized in London. Known to be an unassuming political figure, Sir George Staunton was determined to rekindle the program. Not soon after the Treaty of Nanking was signed did a scandal of translation break out: an article in the peace treaty was missing in the translated version. The interpreter for the British Empire was accused of being bribed by the Chinese to betray the British Empire. Was it true? Or was this simply a political intrigue to humiliate the British? In fact, during the war, Staunton, being an old Chinese hand and an expert of Chinese translation, had already warned about the vulnerability of the government in view of the chronic lack of competent interpreters. However, as party politics prevailed, his good intentions were ignored. Even worse, he was sidelined. After seeing that the scandal had hijacked Britain’s war glory, he was resolute in fixing the problem. This time he used his own might to set the tone for British Sinology for years to come.

Abstract

This essay examines the effort made by a French scholar named Albert Étienne Jean-Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie (1844–1894) to translate the basic text of the Yijing (易經 Classic of Changes) into English, and the role that his idiosyncratic translations and interpretations played in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theoretical debates over “the Western origins of Chinese civilization” (中國文化西來說). A central argument of the essay is that both politics and ethnocentrism played a significant role in shaping the responses of Western and East Asian scholars to this particular translation, influencing, in turn, Japanese and Chinese translations of it. In the end, however, new archaeological discoveries in China, together with the rise and rapid growth of Chinese nationalism, sounded the death knell for Terrien de Lacouperie’s controversial theories.