Translation, Globalisation and Localisation

A Chinese Perspective

Wang Ning, Sun Yifeng, Wang Ning, Sun Yifeng

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781847695352
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The global/local distinction has changed significantly, and the topic has been heatedly debated in literary and cultural as well as translation scholarship. In this age of globalisation, the traditional definition of translation has been altered. In the present anthology, translation is viewed as a cultural and political practice, and accordingly translation studies is based on a heightened awareness of global/local tensions in translation and of its moderating and transforming impact on local cultural paradigms. All the essays in this anthology deal with issues of translation from a cultural and theoretic perspective with regard to tensions and conflicts between global and local interests and values. No matter how different their approaches may seem, the essays are thematically integrated to discuss translation in a dialectical framework: either "globalising" Chinese issues internationally, or "localising" general and international issues domestically.

Part 1

Historical Overviews

Chapter 1

Transvaluing the Global: Translation,
Modernity and Hegemonic Discourse

XIE MING

The question of globalisation and translation has often been discussed in terms of the processes of global capitalist economy and their social, economic and political consequences. Michael Cronin (2003), for example, offers a set of incisive reflections on the changing geography of translation practice in contemporary globalised societies and economies. This chapter aims to highlight some of the intellectual problems in considering the role and context of cultural translation in modern China in terms of modernity and globalisation.

Keeping up with the World

Among contemporary theorists of globalisation, Roland Robertson (1992) was one of the first to emphasise the interpenetration of the dual processes of ‘the particularization of the universal and the universalization of the particular’ (pp. 177–178). On the one hand, the process of particularising the universal ‘does involve the thematization of the issue of universal (i.e. global) “truth”’; on the other hand, the process of universalising the particular involves ‘the global valorization of particular identities’. But the crucial point for Robertson (1992) is that the global context of such a valorisation is more important than any specific assertion of particular identity: ‘Identity, tradition and demand for indigenization only makes sense contextually. Moreover, uniqueness cannot be regarded simply as a thing-in-itself. […] In brief, globalization – as a form of “compression” of the contemporary world and the basis of a new hermeneutic for world history – realizes and “equalizes” all sociocultural formations’, thereby registering ‘the increasing salience of civilizational and societal distinctiveness’ (pp. 130–131; original italics). Here, Robertson clearly formulates the paradox that globalisation equalises all cultures and also simultaneously enables each culture to articulate its own distinctiveness. Robertson (1995) compresses the interpenetration of these two dimensions into the notion of ‘glocalisation’ as a process of acilitating ‘the diffusion of ‘general modernity’’ across ‘geographically distinct civilizations’, a process in which ‘homogenizing and heterogenizing tendencies’ can be ‘mutually implicative’ (p. 27). Furthermore, Robertson (1990) emphasises the relations between globalisation and modernity and characterises globalisation as ‘a particular series of developments concerning the concrete structuration of the world as a whole’ (p. 20). This definition has the merit of highlighting the concretely structured and constructed nature of the global situation and its incessantly shifting patterns of both temporal movement and spatial configuration.

Globalisation has non-Western as well as Western origins (see the essays by a number of professional historians in Hopkins (2002a)). Globalisation is much more than the ‘rise of the West’ (as some commentators have argued), or the extension of Western dominance to every part of the globe, or even a historical consequence of colonialism and a new form of cultural imperialism. Globalisation is certainly not a new phenomenon or process occurring in the last few decades of the 20th century. Historically, globalisation has always been associated with a certain assertion of universal claims. But Christianity is not the only belief system to have made such universalist claims. Other major religions or cultural systems such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism have made similar globalising and universalising claims, though many scholars (in both East and West) have found it ‘easy to assume that all societies can be encompassed by a teleology that is fundamentally Western in conception’ (Hopkins, 2002b: 21). In the wake of the Cold War, there has been much talk of the ‘End of History’ or the triumph of global capitalism. This view of globalisation seems to assume that ‘there is no place left on the “globe” where the capitalist system, its values, its power, and way of life can be contested’: The ‘globe’ is all there is, and despite its diversity, it is to have a single future, prolongation of the prevailing relation of forces. Globalisation is thus the successor to the notion of ‘One World’, itself a recent offshoot of the ‘universal history’ that was ‘the Enlightenment heir of the Christian eschatological narrative’ (Weber, 2001: 15).

Modern Chinese globalisation has at least three major phases: first, the modernisation movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the May Fourth New Culture movement; second, Marxist universalism as embodied in the Chinese communist revolution; and third, the reform movement since the late 1970s and the current process of global capitalism facilitating China’s integration with the advanced West. Each of these waves of modernisation is also a period of intense and large-scale translation and appropriation of Western knowledge, ideas, theories and ideologies.

The most influential teleological model of universal history in modern China is of course Marxism, which has enabled Chinese communist intellectuals and leaders in the course of the 20th century to re-insert China into the history of Western modernity as a universalising process, into the global narrative of progressive transition. Despite their divergence of views in many fields, Chinese intellectuals generally share a strong collective faith in the various paradigms of modernisation. In the modern Chinese context, the antinomy of China/West is by no means a simple binary opposition, or a double bind, but a more complex structure of supplementarity, différance and imbrication. As Jacques Derrida (1976) points out:

what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three. (p. 36; original italics)

Thus it is a triple structure, involving not only China (Self) and the West (Other), but also the doubling image of China as the West, of the West in China. Such binary oppositions reveal the positionality of domination and power relations. ‘China’ can be taken as the site of difference, itself not a positive, valorised term. In so far as any representation has the character of a process, it has its historicity. Globalisation in the modern Chinese context has largely been a continuous movement of attraction and attrition. To use a rhetorical term, we might see this movement as having a chiasmic structure of imbrication: modern China is forced to modernise and globalise under the sign of the West, even while it has never relinquished its own traditional assumptions of Chinese universal culture (and empire). The antinomy of ‘China/West’ should thus be seen as an effect produced by the historical movement of différance, that is, the product of a difference that produces difference in a historical movement in which the two opposing terms are not pre-given entities.

In Chinese, globalisation is quan qiu hua. The last character means ‘-ise’ or ‘-isation’ denoting process, transformation or intensification. The literal meaning of the first two characters quan (complete or total) and qiu (globe or earth) is ‘total globe’ or ‘world-wide’. The whole phrase can plausibly be rendered in English as ‘totalising the globe’ or even ‘globalising the globe’. This seemingly tautological and certainly intensified expression perhaps also indicates a certain Chinese awareness of an idea of totality in relation to which Chinese modernity may be appropriately framed. But, as Fredric Jameson (1998b) has emphasised, globalisation produces ‘an untotalizable totality which intensifies binary relations between its parts – mostly nations, but also regions and groups, which, however, continue to articulate themselves on the model of national identities’ (p. xii). There is a touch of paradox in another expression or slogan that has become popular in China since the early 1980s: zou xiang shijie (literally ‘going toward the world’ or perhaps ‘going global’) was initially the name of a book series edited by Zhong Shuhe republishing a number of works by an earlier generation of Chinese authors about their encounter with Western culture and civilisation. Unlike the indeterminacy and uncertainty of ‘future’ in the phrase zou xiang weilai (literally ‘going toward the future’, the title of another popular book series in the mid-1980s), zou xiang shijie is more definite in its geographical reference and spatial conception, accentuating the fact that China had opted out of the world system for some time and was now eager to catch up with, and integrate with, advanced (Western) modernity, ‘to keep up with the world’. This is again attested by a more recent slogan – yu guoji jiegui (literally ‘to get on the same tracks as the international [norm]’ or ‘to integrate with the international [norm]’). During the New Culture movement in the early 20th century, there were similar expressions such as shijie zhuyi (‘worldism’), tianxia zhuyi (‘all-under-heaven-ism’) and guoji hua (‘internationalisation’). Martin Albrow (1997) has emphasised the ways in which the notion of ‘the globe’ is inherently a substantive concept and has ‘an undisputed materiality’, even though it may often appear far removed from the daily routines of our lives. ‘Modern’, on the other hand, ‘is a quality without abiding substance’. The global can thus be seen as a challenge to both ‘the particularism of nationalism’ and ‘the abstract nature of modernism’ (p. 81). But for Chinese intellectuals, there is no strict distinction between the global and the modern (or even the postmodern), though in the 1980s (as in the May Fourth period) there were strong attempts to articulate the problematic of Chinese modernisation in terms of the conflict between (Chinese) tradition (gu ‘ancient’) and (Western) modernity (jin ‘modern’).

Miscegenative Proliferation?

Massive and systematic translation projects were undertaken in China during the 1980s and 1990s. Two early and influential ones were the ‘Toward the Future’ series edited by Jin Guantao and the ‘Culture: China and the World’ series edited by Gan Yang, which introduced important and influential Western works of the humanities and the social sciences. Such large-scale translation from the West can be found in an earlier moment of tremendous transformation in modern Chinese history when the project of modernity was initiated, accompanied and underwritten by the unprecedented translation and appropriation of Western knowledge. The ‘New Culture’ movement in the early 20th century was called ‘the Chinese Renaissance’ by Hu Shih, one of its prominent leaders. The translation and importation of Western knowledge and thought played a crucial part in this self-conscious collective effort of Chinese intellectuals to modernise China. A typical slogan was Lu Xun’s nalai zhuyi (‘grabbism’: to grab whatever serves China’s needs from foreign cultures). In his book The Chinese Renaissance, published in 1934 in English, Hu Shih (1934) wrote:

Contact with strange civilizations brings new standards of value with which the native culture is re-examined and re-evaluated, and conscious reformation and regeneration are the natural outcome of such transvaluation of values. Without the benefit of an intimate contact with the civilization of the West, there could not be the Chinese Renaissance. (p. 47)

In the ‘Preface’ to the book, Hu found it necessary to reassure his Western readers:

The product of this rebirth looks suspiciously occidental. But, scratch its surface and you will find that the stuff of which it is made is essentially the Chinese bedrock which much weathering and corrosion have only made stand out more clearly – the humanistic and rationalistic China resurrected by the touch of the scientific and democratic civilization of the new world. (p. 47)

Hu’s earlier book in English, The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China (1922), written as a dissertation under John Dewey, is an example of his application of modern Western philosophical methods to the re-interpretation of traditional Chinese thought, in a kind of analogical remapping through the grids of Western philosophy. I.A. Richards (1968), who was teaching at Peking University and Tsinghua University in the late 1920s, complained that Hu Shih ‘too found in his Chinese texts mirrors in which what he had learned of Western philosophy at Columbia (Pragmatism, Theory of Inference, and Evolution) could be reflected. He too showed the same tendency to accommodate his material to a pre-formed system rather than to examine it for its own sake’ (p. 225). Apparently Richards was distressed by the easy parity of assumptions and parallels in the translation and interpretation of Chinese texts:

What we have to prepare for is the probability that, as Mencius begins to speak for himself, the words will mainly carry ideas of the Western tradition which Mencius would know nothing of. I have listened to very learned scholars, Chinese and Western, lecturing to me on Mencius. What I mostly learned was which Western philosophers had most captured their imaginations. (pp. 205–206; original italics)

Behind Richards’ anxiety perhaps lurked an impulse to keep the identities of Chinese and Western traditions separate and distinct. But there is justification in Richards’ insistence on not conforming everything to ‘a preformed system’.

Richards was a keen observer of the ‘Chinese Renaissance’ and was very concerned with the large-scale translation and importation into Chinese of Western concepts such as instinct, emotion, knowledge, truth, justice, socialism, value, democracy and humanism:

We ourselves know how ambiguous such words are and how difficult it is, with all the resources of our own traditional, historical and analytic technique, to keep them in control. When they are rendered into Chinese ‘equivalents’ the risk of their generating a new crop of ambiguities, not parallel to those with which they are already afflicted, becomes excessive; and there is only too good reason to believe that this miscegenative proliferation has been happening on a very great scale. (p. 232; original italics)

What is striking here is the phrase ‘miscegenative proliferation’, which obviously shows Richards’ disapproval. But ‘miscegenative proliferation’, or the proliferation of new meanings of mixed birth, also aptly captures both the inherent drift of interpretation and the hybrid nature of modern cultural identities. Indeed, there is an older Latin term, contaminatio, which names a similar condition of cross-cultural production. Contaminatio comes from contaminare, which means ‘to render impure by contact or mixture’, ‘to corrupt, defile’, ‘spoil by mixing’, ‘botch together’ – a charge made against the Latin author Terence for ‘spoiling by combining or altering’ Greek plays that he freely translated and adapted into his own plays in Latin (see Beare, 1959; Chalmers, 1957). Gianni Vattimo (1997) has suggested that hermeneutics is fundamentally concerned with contaminatio, understood in a positive sense of the proliferation or ‘increase of being’. But he does raise the question of whether the negative sense of contamination is not equally intrinsic to ‘our own experience of modernity’. But since ‘we must acknowledge that we live in a world where cultural identities have already been dissolved, for the most part, in a kind of common lingua franca’ through ‘mutual translations and interpretations of cultures’, ‘the contradictions of untranslatability can only be overcome’ (pp. 59–60) through an acceptance of being as event and difference. Interpretation as event re-inserts the interpreter into a specific moment in the history of the interpreted text or object. Thus, there is a determined historicity of the translator’s interpretation and translation.

Sinicising Modernity

A notable example of the historicity of the translator/interpreter in modern China is Yan Fu, the first serious and most influential translator of modern Western thought, publishing in 1898 his Chinese version of a part of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (1894). Yan Fu’s selection of Huxley’s Romanes Lecture for translation was motivated by an urgent sense of national salvation in the face of challenges from both the West and Japan. This ‘translation’, however, represented Yan Fu’s own interpretation and recreation of Darwinian ideas in terms of traditional Chinese ethical categories. Yan Fu deployed what he took to be analogous Chinese ideas to reconcile the conflict between the tenets of Darwinism (‘struggle for existence’ [wujing] and ‘survival of the fittest’ [tianzhe]) and a moral sense of collective need. The title he adopted for the translation is tianyan lun (on heavenly evolution), alluding to his Chinese ethical notion of the ‘perfect fulfillment of heavenly endowments’. As Yan Fu (2004) put it in his preface to the translation, written in 1896: ‘Huxley’s book aims to rectify the errors of Spencer’s laissez faire. Much of its argument overlaps with what our ancient sages said. Moreover, themes such as self-strengthening and the preservation of the race are constant motifs in it’ (p. 100). Yan Fu deployed many traditional Chinese notions such as dao (the way), xing (innate character), tian (heaven), sheng (life) and qun (group, collective) for a forceful presentation of the Darwinian idea of the struggle for existence. The ruthless Darwinian struggle of nature was translated into the Chinese concept of tian neng (heavenly endowment, or an inborn capacity endowed by ‘heaven’ for self-preservation and for a harmonious social relationship of qun (group)).

Yan Fu tried to find analogues in the Chinese classics for many of the Western concepts and terms that he attempted to translate. In his translation of J.S. Mill’s System of Logic, ‘logic’ was translated as ‘ming xue’ (‘study or theory of names’), because he believed that the connotations of ming were very close to those of ‘logos’; moreover, ming captures the meaning of ‘sincerity’ (qiu cheng) and ‘the rectification of names’ (zheng ming), in his view, two significant goals of learning and thinking (see Gao & Wu, 1992: 134). Of course, ‘logic’ is very different from the Confucian emphasis on the ‘rectification of names’. In a letter to Liang Qichao, Yan Fu emphasised the importance of introducing Western political and legal concepts such as ‘Right’ and ‘Obligation’. He first used quanli as a translation of ‘Right’, in fact a borrowed translation from Japanese, but he was dissatisfied. Later ...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Series Editor
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Historical Overviews
• Part 2: Current Developments
• Bibliography