Language Arts & Disciplines

Sinologists have long been at the forefront of cultural exchanges between China and the West, and translation is a necessary pre-condition for their intercultural exchange. This book merges the academic fields of translation studies and sinology, to gain greater insights into how Chinese works have been transmitted across cultural and linguistic borders, and how translation has enabled global scholarship on Chinese culture from the Ming-Qing period to the twentieth century.

Thanks to dedicated efforts of early missionaries, pedagogues, and linguists, we can trace back the evolution of modern Cantonese—one of the most spoken dialects in China, Southeast Asia, and globally—while differences in sounds, words, and grammar distinguish the old from contemporary speech today.<br><br>Not much was recorded in official documents or gazetteers about the early history of Hong Kong where Cantonese is its most popular dialect. The knowledge of Cantonese is likewise quite limited except for occasional mentions of its culture and customs in writings here and there. For a long time, Cantonese was deemed a local dialect enjoying little prestige among the intellectuals. Its language and its origin remained much of a mystery until the mid-twentieth century when scholars started to accord it with increasing attention.<br><br>In <i>Cantonese: Since the 19th Century</i>, Cheung offers profound insights to some thirty firsthand century-old materials, with findings that will be useful for ongoing efforts to trace the development of a language that has gone through many rounds of incredible and, at times dramatic, changes during the last two hundred years.

Translation and Global Asia: Relocating Cultural Production Network explores the richness of non-Western discourses and practices of translation, focusing on translational exchanges among non-Western languages and Asian translation traditions. The volume provides insight into the translation traditions of various Asian countries and addresses literary translation, translation history, and translation and colonialism.

This collection deploys archive studies and translation hermeneutics to merge the historical study of sinology with translation research. Focusing on the context of contributions by early Sinologists and their translations of works in Chinese, the essays in this volume ask why certain works were chosen for translation in particular historical moments; how they were interpreted, translated, and manipulated; and what influence they had, especially in advancing sinology in various countries. This book reconstructs a wider historical and intellectual context from which certain translations emerged and further expands sinology through the extensive use of overlooked archive materials.

This volume aims at studying the role played by translation in the modernization process of the East Asian countries. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many people saw the West as a model for modernization and hence modernization in East Asia was more often than not taken as a process of learning from or even imitating the West. In this process, translation played a crucial role, when efforts were made to import Western ideas, knowledge, concepts, and practices. The papers in this volume study and explain the various translation phenomena in the modernization processes of China, Korea, and Japan.

As a sequel to An Encyclopaedia of Translation: Chinese-English, English-Chinese published in 1995, this volume focuses on practical translation and interpreting, the two emerging areas of increasing importance in recent decades, and all chapters are fully illustrated with examples in translation between Chinese and English. Scholars and experts from China, France, Hong Kong, Spain, Taiwan, the UK, and the United States share their experiences in translation or interpreting practice. An Encyclopaedia of Practical Translation and Interpreting should be of great interest to both specialists and general readers.