Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities

The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. Translating Early Modern China tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each chapter finds a particular translator resurrected from the past to tell the story of a text that helped shape the history of translation in China. In Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more, these texts helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. This volume explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian's craft. The book's many storiesâ€"of glossaries and official Ming translation bureaus, of bilingual Ming Chinese-Mongolian language primers, of the first Latin grammar of Manchu, of a Qing Manchu conversation manual, of a collection of Manchu poems by a Qing translatorâ€"serve as case studies that open out into questions of language and translation in China's past, of the use of fiction as a historian's tool, and of the ways that translation creates language.

Author: Carla Nappi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 09/08/2023
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 9.19h x 6.18w x 0.56d
ISBN13: 9780198888154
ISBN10: 0198888155
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Asian | Chinese
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 19th Century
- Language Arts & Disciplines | Linguistics | General