scholarly journals At the Borders of Translation: Traditional and Modern(ist) Adaptations, East and West

2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tak-Hung Leo Chan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Far East ◽  
Adaptive Methods ◽  
The West ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Inferior Status ◽  
East And West

Abstract Adaptation, as both a method and a textual category, has been a perennial favorite with text mediators who call themselves translators, appearing especially prominently in intersemiotic rather than interlingual translation. The present paper examines the concepts and practices of adaptation, drawing particular attention to examples from both the West and the Far East. Just as a preference for adaptive methods in translation can be seen in certain periods of Western literary history (e.g. seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France), there were times when adaptations were hailed in China, Japan and Korea. In the course of the discussion, reference will be made to (1) the modernist adaptations undertaken by Western writers through much of the twentieth century; (2) the sequences of novelistic adaptations spawned in Korea and Japan by Chinese classical novels; and (3) the adaptations of European novels by the prodigious twentieth-century Chinese translator Lin Shu. It will be shown that there is a need for translation scholars to question the theoretical validity of the dichotomy between the two modes of “translation” and “adaptation,” as well as an urgency to reconsider the supposed “inferior” status of adaptations.

Interracial Outposts in Siberia: Nerchinsk, Kiakhta, and the Russo-Chinese Trade in the Seventeenth/Eighteenth Centuries

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 322-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva-Maria Stolberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Far East ◽  
The West ◽  
Multiethnic Identity ◽  
Peter The Great ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Border Trade ◽  
Chinese Trade

AbstractThis essay underlines the essential role of Russo-Chinese border trade in the creation of the multiethnic identity of Siberian outposts such as Nerchinsk and Kiakhta. In the seventeenth/early eighteenth century-under Tsar Peter the Great-Siberia became a meeting place for Russian, Central Asian and Chinese cultures. Furthermore, the Russo-Chinese trade was an important parameter of European economic expansion. Europe and the Far East met territorially only along the Eurasian frontier between Siberia and the Manchu Empire. Profitable trade, however, experienced a severe decline in the 1720s. Peter I's rigid fiscal policy choked off private initiative and prevented Siberia from becoming a major commercial entrepot between the West and East.

Yellow Peril

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Keevak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Far East ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The West ◽  
East Asians ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Western Concept ◽  
China And Japan

This chapter examines how the discourse of yellow not only became ubiquitous in the West, but also migrated into East Asian cultures during the period 1895–1920, giving rise to “the yellow peril”—the notion that East Asians were yellow and perilous. It begins with a historical background on how the Far East came to be seen as a “yellow peril,” a term coined in 1895 and generally credited to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, specifically in response to Japan's defeat of China at the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War (also known as “The Yellow War”). The chapter then considers how the Western concept of a “yellow race” was understood in China and Japan before concluding with a discussion of the ways in which yellowness persisted as a potentially dangerous and threatening racial category in the early twentieth century.

Taxonomies of Yellow

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Keevak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Comparative Anatomy ◽  
Far East ◽  
East Asians ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The People ◽  
Carl Linnaeus ◽  
French Physician

This chapter focuses on the emergence of new sorts of human taxonomies as well as new claims about the color of all human groups, including East Asians, during the course of the eighteenth century, as well as their racial implications. It first considers the theory advanced in 1684 by the French physician and traveler François Bernier, who proposed a “new division of the Earth, according to the different species or races of man which inhabit it.” One of these races, he suggested, was yellow. Then in 1735, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published Systema naturae, in which he categorized homo sapiens into four different skin colors. Finally, at the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, also a physician and the founder of comparative anatomy, declared that the people of the Far East were a yellow race, as distinct from the white “Caucasian” one.

First Round the World: 1519–22

1963 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-466
Author(s):  
E. G. R. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Far East ◽  
The West ◽  
The Far East ◽  
World Geography ◽  
The World ◽  
Secret Knowledge

In 1518 a Spanish gentleman, just back from the West Indies, addressed a Summary of World Geography to his King. In the Dedication he pointed out that since the Pope's Line, which parted the Portuguese and Spanish spheres, ran through the mouth of the River Amazon, 28°W. of Ferro, all the World beyond 150°E. (i.e. 130°E. of Greenwich) lay open to exploitation by Spain. And according to the World Map of the day the area included Java, Japan, King Solomon's Ophir, and (best of all) the Spice Islands or Moluccas from which the Portuguese were already making fabulous fortunes. This gentleman was not the only person to speak to the young King on this matter. The captains and pilots who had opened up the Spice Islands for Portugal were dissatisfied with the rewards which their own King had given them, and a number of them offered their services and their special and secret knowledge to his rival. Ferdinand Magellan was one of them. From his experience in the Far East he was of the opinion that the Moluccas could be safely approached from the west, by way of the Great Ocean. And it should be emphasized that in suggesting this he had no romantic notions about becoming the first man to circumnavigate the globe. He put forward a business pro position which the Spanish King accepted. Immediately the most thorough preparations were set on foot. They included the making of new charts, new globes, new sea-quadrants and sea-astrolabes, by the best pilots and craftsmen of the day, of whom the most were Portuguese.

Pensée 4: Striking New State–Society Bargains over the Internet

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-537
Author(s):  
JON W. ANDERSON
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Far East ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The West ◽  
Limited Access ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
Middle Easterners

Not long ago a MESA Bulletin reader objected to introducing coverage of the Internet, saying that there were few Middle East studies online. However, you do find Middle Easterners. With increasingly accessible technology, there are thousands of websites that are added to listservs and now supplemented by blogs from, by, and about Middle Easterners. The trend has been from witness to participant. Yet the subjective register of the Internet in Middle East and North Africa is often a new example of exceptionalism: less free than in the West, less extensive than in the Far East, slow to grow and stunted when it does, with limited access and high costs that confine it demographically and culturally, not to mention politically. That is also what most comparative measures tell, but those do not measure what is happening. Early interest a decade ago has subsequently faded—or phased—into something more interesting than another story of absences.

The Twentieth Century in the Far East

1937 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 176
Author(s):  
B. M. G. ◽  
P. H. B. Kent
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Far East ◽  
The Far East
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document