化 境 神 似

About this blog's name

FOR OVER A CENTURY now the most widespread guiding principle of translation in China has been to strive for fidelity, fluency, and elegance. The 信达雅 (xìn dá yǎ) principle was proposed by Yán Fù (严复), one of the great translators of the late Qing, in the preface to his translation of Thomas Huxley. So famous is this phrase that a cursory web search will turn up dozens of translation agencies citing it as their guiding principle.

This wasn't the first theory of translation to arise in China; Buddhists translating from Sanskrit had been arguing over how best to render scripture for well over one thousand years, varying between word-for-word gloss and paraphrase, and trying to find ways to recontextualize texts that came out of a far-off culture in the distant past. Xuán Zàng (玄奘), a monk living in the Tang capital Chang'an during the seventh century, revolutionized the translation world with his "New Translation" technique, a reconciliation of the literal and the paraphrase. Translating prodigious amounts of religious texts, he prescribed five classes of terms that would not be translated, preserving in his translations the Sanskrit sounds of words like pranja (般若 bōrě) and bodhi (菩提 pútí). For the rest, he followed the maxim "既须求实，又须喻俗", or striving for fidelity while explaining in common terms.

Others who followed Yan Fu tried to interpret precisely what 信达雅 meant in practice. "Elegance" in particular presented a problem, with translators and critics each giving their own interpretation of how to measure and achieve the aesthetic dimension. For better or for worse, Yan Fu's principle and its derivatives dominated the first half of 20th century Chinese translation theory. Xiè Tiānzhèn (谢天振), in his excellent book Medio-Translatology (《译介学》，上海外语教育出版社，1999), from which I've extracted the above summary, describes what happened next:

Yan Fu's "Fidelity, Fluency, and Elegance" had such a deep influence that even today practically all textbooks and scholarly works on translation theory cannot escape its confines when talking about translation standards. This certainly is a source of worry for scholars.

From this perspective, it is clear that Fù Léi's (傅雷) "spiritual resemblance theory" (神似论) of the 50s and Qián Zhōngshū's (钱钟书) "transmigration theory" (化境说) of the 60s opened up new horizons for Chinese literary translation studies. This demonstrates that the discourse on literary translation standards in China's translation field has broken free from the shackles of the theses of the western linguistic school of translation, and has proposed an aesthetic standard with Chinese artistic characteristics—this is a highly Chinese translation theory. In the preface to his translation of Balzac's Old Goriot, Fu Lei writes of his "spiritual resemblance theory" by likening translation to painting a picture: "The effect of translation ought to be like a copy of a picture; the aim is not a resemblance of form but rather a resemblance of spirit." This "spiritual resemblance" Fu Lei talks about is given a further explanation later in the same document: "Capture its essence and discard its shell, inhabit the center and forget the exterior." Qian Zhongshu's "transmigration theory" is discussed in his paper Lin Shu's Translations 《林纾的翻译》. It follows the same lines as Fu Lei's "spiritual resemblance", but raises it to an even higher level. Qian writes: "The highest measure of literary translation is transformation (化). A piece of writing taken from one language to another without showing the strain inflicted by differences in language customs while perfectly preserving the original style can be called a 'transmigration'." (p. 120)

This blog takes its name from these two theories, 化境 (huàjìng) and 神似 (shénsì). Qian Zhongshu borrows the language of Buddhism for his standard, bringing us back to the earliest translation theorists. Such a transmigration is too demanding, critics have claimed in the decades since the 70s, but it's something to strive for, at any rate.

(originally posted on 2004.12.14)