Volume 3, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Translation across time in East and West encounters: an overview; Guest Editors: Alexandra Assis Rosa and Guowen Huang

Within Translation Studies, much research has been conducted under “the specific viewpoint [history] applied to the variety of material objects that share the label ‘translation’”. Moreover, the historical viewpoint responds to readers’ expectations: be it a case study or a theoretical discussion, some historical background is demanded by accepted academic standards. It is part of a required context. However, a different issue emerges when the project of a history of translation in a particular country is to be reflected upon. My concern will be meta-historiographical in nature. Indeed, one of the main hurdles to be cleared is the use of some recurrent concepts in traditional historiography, such as “fact” and “event,” “change,” “progress” or “period.” To what extent are they appropriate in translation history? Additionally, the narrative form implicit in history writing has to be tackled, as it implies a great deal of selection and exclusion, and above all questions of sequence and causation which are at the core of historical thought. The discussion of the above mentioned concepts will be illustrated with examples from Portuguese translation history.

As a western canonical text, Shakespeare has been translated and staged in East Asia in various ways and often adapted into traditional performance styles to counterbalance its western textual canonicity with the authenticity of eastern performative forms and styles. Negotiations between west and east, which reflect the colonial and postcolonial experiences of the region, have been a critical focus of academic investigations. What is remarkable, yet often overlooked in the west and in Asia itself, is that there were complex negotiations among East Asian translators and theatre practitioners in the early reception and translation of Shakespeare. The doubleness of Japanese colonialism – which first behaved as the “east” that absorbed western culture and later took the position of the “west” that provided advanced modern culture and technology to neighbouring countries – is the most notable element in inter-Asian cultural negotiation in the early twentieth century in general, and in the translation and staging of Shakespeare in particular. Such historicity in translation was nevertheless generally unrecognized, and even ignored, in the post–World War II cultural and social contexts in East Asia. This essay aims to explore the “erased” historicity of the translation in East Asia by examining Japanese translation of the National Changgeuk Theatre of Korea’s production of Romeo and Juliet (2009) as it was published in a multilingual online digital archive called Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A), and to add another layer to the existing discourses on translation in this region that have mainly focused on the east-west binary. The translation strategies employed by the A|S|I|A team have sought to address the complexity of the history of translation of Shakespeare in Korea and Japan, and of discourse making in the postcolonial South Korea. The article also suggests the potential of a digital platform like A|S|I|A in capturing and representing inter-Asian negotiations thanks to its capacity to juxtapose multiple elements of translation on the screen.

The history of translation is a site of memory that gathers testimonies of various kinds, from texts to images, from translated literature to statements reflecting on translation praxis. In Portugal, the existing anthologies of comments on translation into Portuguese are heavily dependent on a Eurocentric view of Portuguese literary and translation history, and rather neglect or elide the discourses of those who translate(d) lesser known literatures, particularly those written in non-Western languages, as is the case of Chinese and Japanese. The present article conceptualizes a project that seeks to put together a collection of meta-discourses by translation agents working with languages and textual traditions other than Western. The aim of such a project is to delocalize Portugal’s history of translation by offering a corpus that testifies to the long-term cultural transfers between two geographical extremes: the Far East, which here refers exclusively to China and Japan, and the Far West, which is where I position Portugal from the viewpoint of the Far East. This anthology of texts about a Far Eastern geocultural periphery in translation would be an important bibliographical source for historical research necessary to (re)think, (re)write, and (re)map the Portuguese tradition of translation. The kinds of text to be anthologized are illustrated on the basis of a case study: the preface by the Portuguese symbolist poet Camilo Pessanha (1867–1926) to his direct translation from Chinese into Portuguese of eight elegies from the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), which was published in Macau in 1914. The article is thus divided into three parts: the first part provides an historical overview of the translation flows between the Far West and the Far East; the second part sketches the structure of a representative anthology of voices translating from East Asian languages; and the third part analyses Pessanha’s statements on his poetry translations and literariness of Chinese language.

The earliest and most extensive systematic descriptions of Philippine languages are found in the grammatical and lexicographical works of Spanish Catholic priests from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Tagalog was the most studied among these languages, and was generally portrayed as the most “refined” because of certain cues that overtly mark verbal politeness. As these politeness cues were taken as translation constraints in Latinate tongues, they are often explained through solutions that operated on arbitrary equivalences between Tagalog and Castilian. A closer reading of these equivalences reveals that aside from the reduction of language to the usual categories of grammar, the proposed translation solutions also inscribed verbal politeness within a hierarchized vision of colonial polity, and repurposed the pre-existing mechanisms of Tagalog so as to articulate a Christian(ized) discourse.

This article investigates the way Western configurations of Eastern identities are formed. It focusses on how Western encounters in the East are represented in the West and what role translation plays in this process. It probes the representation of those cultural practices and encounters that are particularly prominent in the literary genre of travel writing. Here, three Dutch accounts of travels to Guangzhou (China) from the late nineteenth century will be compared, and their methods of translation will be analyzed. The examples show that a different style of translation can result in a different image of the city and that the travel accounts under investigation possess varying degrees of Orientalizing and appropriative style, even though the three writers follow more or less the same itinerary. It appears that they are not merely providing a representation of the Other, but, in fact, are merging the Other with the Self. Ultimately, the degree of merging the Other with the Self depends on the style of translation and each of these styles is defining for the configuration of identity, which, from a Western view, makes the East appear inferior, superior or universally equal.

The contentious bestsellerdom of Coelho’s O Alquimista (published in 1988) has not only placed it endurably on top of the prestigious bestseller lists, but also made it subject to severe criticism. With copyrights sold in 80 languages, the narrative creates a unique form of communication implementing a prolonged, interactive language–culture relationship, and recreating appealingly unique narrative structures addressing readers in new contexts. This study attempts a functional semantico–semiotic reading of the narrative structures of O Alquimista in English, Arabic and Turkish, relating the “recreated texts” to their sociocultural “context of interpretation”, and viewing them as the outcome of two separate acts of communication functioning successively on the same semantic content . The study argues that rediscoursing the narrative cross-culturally yields variant narrative structures, each constructed twice – internally , in the act of encoding through writing, and externally through the reader–text interaction in reading.