A Cross-disciplinary Dialogue with Professor Lauren Pfister （I）

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[作者简介]

        岳峰，福建师范大学外国语学院教授、博士、博士生导师、博士后流动站合作导师、笔译学科带头人、翻译系主任、教学名师、中国译协与福建译协理事、福建电视台前英文节目特聘英文专家、美国耶鲁大学research affiliate（2005）、福建师范大学宗教文化研究所特聘研究员、Translating China编委、《外语教学理论与实践》（CSSCI）等杂志审稿人；曾访学欧美澳。在国内外已正式出版的学术专著、译著、工具书与教材26部，正式发表中英文论文60多篇，其中在SSCI、A&HCI、CSSCI、CSCD、北大核心与中国科学院主管杂志发表论文35篇。主持、参与各级课题、项目20项，省部级10项。40次获得各级奖励，2016年获福建省政府社会科学优秀成果奖一等奖与国家出版基金。

中国翻译教授与美国汉学教授就典籍翻译研究展开的对话

YF: Professor Lauren Pfister, historically we know that research pursued in any theoretical science joins hands with that of history, which inevitably involves the influences of religions and philosophical traditions. Such traditional disciplines as history, religious studies and philosophy may, to at least a certain extent, something about the way people act and thinking. Research in the science of translation is no exception. The point I want to make is, translation studies, like any other scientific research, has to transcend translation proper and find itself in a multi-disciplinary setting to make its outcome persuasive. In my own translation research, I, like many other translation scholars in the mainland, have learnt a lot from your perspectives of the above mentioned disciplines. And I think it could be a suitable time to come to some generalizations for a nearly systematic methodology, if possible, in our shared interest.

One of things I am interested in is to observe the difference of in the practical and theoretical starting points of translation researchers from different disciplines. As a linguist, my primary concern is a textual analysis of a translated work. To activate my writing, I would form a framework of linguistic aspects, such as the lexical, syntactical and stylistic aspects. On the lexical level, I would try to find good translations and wrong translations if any. On the syntactical level, I would try to find out the similarities and differences of sentences structures between the source text and the target text. And I will check the conciseness, smoothness, etc., of the translated sentences in comparison with those in the source text. On the stylistic level, I would try to describe my impression of the general atmosphere of the translation with focus on figures of speech, one of the most difficult things for a translator. I would also  concentrate on to what extent the deep meaning, if any, of the source text has been revealed and expressed. After all these lingustic analyses, I will come to the cultural aspect of translation, centering on the translation of culturally-loaded terms. On the basis of this, I will try to evaluate a piece of translation. This is a habitual way of doing research, probably related to my own training in my discipline of linguistics. I notice that you seem to be more keen on the extra-textual elements of translation, such as the relationship between the translator’s diction and his or her ideology, motivation and the style of translation as it is, and also the translator and the society. Would you please tell us your starting point for translation research?

LP:   Allow me to start our dialogue with a word of thanks. What you have conceived in this dialogue, Prof. Yue, is for me a remarkable opportunity, since I am not a professional translator, and still have very much to learn about the theoretical positions and practical concerns which motivate cross-cultural translators. I am looking forward very much to your clarifications, corrective suggestions, and alternative accounts in the process of our dialogue.    

Hermeneutically speaking, we all approach tasks of seeking to understand from cultural perspectives limited to a significant extent by the languages we employ and the historical period in which we live. It is rare to find someone such as the Swiss polyglot and Christian intellectual, Solomon Caesar Malan (1812-1894), who was able to read and write in over 80 languages, but even so, the level of competence he had in certain languages was better or worse according to the texts, persons, and opportunities which his genius was able to encounter.  Translation studies are particularly significant in this light because the theoretical constructive work and practical interests involved in translation always must engage at least two different languages and cultural miliuex.  This being the case, especially when we are seeking to understand the character and limitations of cross-cultural translation at any one point in time – such as how Indian Buddhist monks such as Kumarajiva rendered Buddhist Mahāyana sutras into Chinese, or how current translators render difficult texts such as Kant’s three critiques or Gadamer’s Truth and Method into Chinese, or even how missionary-scholars such as James Legge, Séraphin Couvreur, and Richard Wilhelm rendered ancient classical texts into contemporary English, French and Latin, as well as German respectively – all these involve us in acts of “thick translation” which led those translators to questions about making renderings when there were important technical terms in their source language which had no identifiable conceptual equivalents within their target language. They learned strategies of indirect translation, elliptical phrasing, phonetic transliteration, and seeking for functional equivalents in order to handle those points when their own conscious awareness of the dilemma was heading toward the frustrations tied to what we hear described in those discussing theories of incommensurability. Precisely in these kind of contexts, I do expect that translators will be continually stretching their cross-cultural horizons in order to be ready to handle those difficulties whenever they come across them.

Having stated all this, however, I would want to be very cautious about making any assumptions about this kind of translation work and its study to be the only kind of meaningful theoretical work done by translation scholars.  To the contrary, I would want to claim that different kinds of texts will require different kinds of approaches.  For example, I have had friends working in German-Chinese translations for chemical factories and engineering firms, and others who are doing English-Chinese and Chinese-English renderings for medical companies.  The texts they are dealing with are primarily dealing with procedural steps and technical directions, so that the biggest problems they face are techno-science neologisms which have been created in a source culture and need to be transferred into the target culture’s language.  Otherwise, the translation involves basic sentences giving directions to users, and for this I would assume your linguistic approach would generally be very appropriate.  There is no expectation on the part of the companies or the translators that their materials would be anything more than a prescriptive set of directions to guide those who will be using their products; the simpler and more straightforward they are, the better the rendering will serve its purpose.

Now this does not mean that other forms of linguistic awareness are not helpful for dealing and revealing aspects of more complicated cross-cultural translation work. In trying to understand the nature, limits, and achievements of James Legge’s metrical Book of Poetry《詩經》(1876), a piece that was published in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1997, I was helped very much by the parameters and concepts suggested in works by Peter Newmark and Susanne Bassnet related to the translation of poetry: questions about the ligature of the expressive language in both the source and target languages, overcoming approaches which become too rigorous and lead to non-poetic (and even unintelligible) renderings, looking carefully at rhythms and assonances within the original language and then seeing what might be done functionally to carry over similar feelings within the target language . . . or to reject this as simply infeasible to perform in translation and to move toward more free forms of rendering.  This was particular significant to me in the case of Legge, because his first rendering of the Book of Poetry (1871) was in prose lines, though placed into stanzas, and so was so un-poetical that literary critics complained bitterly that he had not done the Chinese original justice.  So here was a further motivation which truly provoked Legge to explore a new direction, one which he had felt was impossible to accomplish previously.  

What is intriguing to me about this dilemma was that it was not Legge himself, but two of his nephews who did not know Chinese, but used his English renderings to attempt to create more poetic renderings in English of some of those ancient Chinese poems (refracted through their uncle’s sometimes stodgy English prose).  In the end, Legge himself was inspired by their efforts, and so began to enlist the help of others and work on many poems himself with a new insight and motivation into how it might be worked out.  What amazed me was to find that some of those poems – especially in the “Lessons of the States” 國風 he and others who worked with him rendered into Scottish dialect, because when they dealt with soldiers heading out to war and their wives were sending them off, they had a profound Scottish sympathy for that kind of cultural situation.  (Many a Scotsman came to China as part of the British military presence in Hong Kong and elsewhere during the Opium Wars of 1838-1840 and 1858-1860.)  Also, in the sections related to the Greater Odes of the Kingdom 大雅, when there were prayers offered to the Supreme Lord 上帝, these lines were put into King James English, the style of formal prayer using vocabulary  and grammatical ligatures drawn from the 17^th century King James Bible.  This kind of clever shifts in ligature and style captured my attention, and made the detailed study of so many texts all the more hermeneutically interesting and culturally revealing to me.

At this point, let me ask you a question about an experience I had recently in lecturing to graduate students from other parts of China, all of them having Pǔtōnghuà as their mother tongue and English as a foreign language they were expected to work with. I was asked to present them with a long lecture about research resources for doing translation work in ancient Chinese canonical literature rendered into English and the texts of the Bible.  So I introduced them to a number of tools including the recently published series of concordances for ancient Chinese texts published at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a series of Chinese and English biblical concordance by which they could locate classical texts in a relatively easy manner.  In the process I showed them how, when they had identified passages as classical glosses, to locate the appropriate phrases in standard Chinese texts or English renderings of the Bible and then and move across to find the appropriate terminology in a standard rendering within their target language (whether English or Chinese).  Believing that I had made it clear to them that these were tools they needed to get to know and use for these special purposes, I then guided them during the following week through a series of exercise to test their ability in using these materials.  Setting all the necessary concordances and reference books before them in the classrooms, I gave them the assignments, and then was shocked to discover that all they did was go back to their computer screens and to try to find answers by Googling or the use of 百度.  Not even one of them moved to get the concordance and other materials I had mentioned to them earlier, and by the end of the f 51 30323 51 15533 0 0 2769 0 0:00:10 0:00:05 0:00:05 3044irst part of our session, most were clearly frustrated.  Though I was able to recognize this problem and remind the students about the special nature of the work they were required to do, it struck me how the contemporary practices of translation in other parts of China must be terribly dependant upon Internet resources, and so translators in practice rarely use anything else to guide and inform themselves in the process of translation.  This is probably simply a matter of habit, but I was struck deeply by the incoherence of the whole situation, and pondered over its significance. Can you address this as well in your responses to this rather long note?

YF: Yes, but please let me talk about what I have been impressed by your comments first. Your cultural perspective is a shared one among translation theoreticians, actually a stressed one, especially since the cultural turn from the 1980s when the majority of researchers shifted the focus from languages to cultures. And since culture may contain research targets of all social sciences, cultural approaches could be cross-disciplinary approaches by nature. Your observation of Legge’s change of his style in his translation of Book of Poetry is very insightful, and your description of the process of changing is detailed and vivid. That is, to a great extent, because of your approach as a historian, in addition to your linguistic analysis. I have noticed Legge’s change too, but that’s because I happened to find his two versions: one is Volumes 4-5 of his Chinese Classics published in Hongkong in 1871, the other is his revised version published in London in 1876. The former one is actually proses in poetic form, or separate lines, while the latter is a metrical translation. I sensed the drastic shift of orientation in his revised edition, but as I am not a professional historian, I have been unable to put Legge and those people or events that influenced his attitude in a historical setting with sufficient specific historical findings. The historical approach is what I hoped to learn from you, and I hope many linguistics will share this approach. Previously, some scholars criticized Legge’s translation of Book of Poetry for his rhyme-less and consequently un-poetic style. Had more translation scholars been history-conscious, such criticisms would not have been launched.

Now let me come to your question. Precisely in absence of the consciousness of history, the students did not turn to historical treasure of related data through the concordances, but relied entirely on internet resources. Using web tools is a must for translators technically, but with a combined method of linguistics and history, translation learners would not treat the source text merely on a linguistic level, but place it a macro-setting of concrete history with numerous enlightening facts.

In teaching graduates of English to do translation research related to traditional Chinese classics, I also noticed they were googling or baiduing too much, so I advised them to notice the preface, footnotes and especially the appendix and glossary in translated versions, mostly by earlier sinologists. As these all indicate the translator’s reflections while engaged in translation in a specific historical period, using these as clues to interpret the dictions translators used – to render the culturally-loaded terms in particular -- did lead sometimes to fruitful outcomes in their research. As a matter of fact, both the drawbacks and progress of my students’ illuminate the significance of our discussion of cross-disciplinary approaches to translation. Here, I would like to mention your recent publication: Striving for ‘The Whole Duty of Man’: James Legge  and the Scottish Protestant Encounter with China. In this book, you employed an analytic triangulation method of interpretation – moving from (Scottish and Chinese life) experiences to Legge’s mindset and then on to his translations. I believe this is typical cross-disciplinary approach that can be strongly recommended to translatologists.

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