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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Judy Wakabayashi This paper is the third in a triad of linked papers
motivated by a desire to explore and evaluate methods for studying the
history of translation in the Chinese cultural sphere, defined here as China
and those countries that historically adopted Chinese characters as their
written script and used literary Chinese as one of their main written
languages (i.e., Japan, Korea and Vietnam).
Panel 1: Disciplinary Identity: Redefining Translation in the
21st Century
Reflections on top-down and bottom-up approaches to a comparative
history of translation traditions in the Chinese cultural sphere
Kent State University, Ohio, USA
The first paper, “Toward a preliminary model for a comparative history of
translation traditions”, explores a purely theoretical model, laying the
methodological groundwork for a top-down approach to comparative translation
history. Conversely, the second paper, “Translation in the East Asian
Cultural Sphere — Shared Roots, Divergent Paths?”, adopts a bottom-up
inductive approach, attempting to distill broad similarities and specific
differences from the historical realities in this particular configuration
of interrelated translation cultures. The premise is that shared historical
facts (e.g., the use of Chinese characters and literary Chinese, China’s
cultural influence, and the nature of initial contacts with the West) led to
similarities in the translation traditions of countries in the Chinese
cultural sphere, but that divergent local realities also played a role in
producing variations in the nature and timing of the evolution of these
traditions.
The final paper — the proposed paper for this conference — evaluates these
two opposed methodological approaches, reflecting on their strengths and
weaknesses in the light of each other, in an attempt to refine the initial
model and uncover new meanings from the findings sketched by the descriptive
historical study. This paper will not require a familiarity with the earlier
papers, as they will be briefly summarized, but the full papers will be made
available for anyone interested.
© IATIS 2003