A Contrastive Study on the C-E Translation of the Verb of Perception zhijian from the Perspective of Subjective Consciousness and Objective Consciousness

Verbs of perception include sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, of which zhijian belongs to sight is very common in literary works, and its semantic meaning also begins to change with the development of time. Based on the original text and two translated versions of the Water Margin, this paper makes a comparative analysis of the translation strategies of zhijian on the basis that Chinese emphasizes subjective consciousness and the mixed consciousness of subjectivity and objectivity, while English stresses objective consciousness with a clear boundary between subjectivity and objectivity. According to previous studies, this paper regroups the appearance of zhijian and divides it into two categories, namely zhijian at the beginning of a sentence and at the beginning of a minor sentence. On the basis of the context and the changing function of zhijian, that is, the function of being a verb and being a discourse marker, it can be concluded that as the meaning of a verb, the real action, the meaning of zhijian is expressed by “seeing”, so translators usually adopt literal translation; while as a discourse marker, it is no longer the main component of sentence structure, but to highlight the following information, translators will adopt deletion, conversion and retaining. It can be seen that translators often need to convert Chinese characterized by subjective consciousness into English dominated by objective consciousness, thus conforming to various meaning of zhijian.

The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: “The Water Margin” and the Making of a National Canon

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Translation, Colonization, and the Fall of Utopia: The Qing Decline as Explained through Chinese Fiction

This study focuses on Meiji-period Japanese engagement with the late imperial Chinese novel Sequel to ‘The Water Margin’ (Shuihu houzhuan): an early Qing continuation of the classic Water Margin that focuses on the Liangshan outlaws’ colonization of a mythical “Siam” in the wake of the fall of the Northern Song dynasty. Like its parent work, Shuihu houzhuan found an enthusiastic readership beyond the borders of China. The novel was translated into Japanese several times during the Meiji period: most famously, by the poet and scholar Mori Kainan, whose translation was published by the Tokyo-based Kōin shinshisha publishing house between 1893 and 1895. In addition to the fact that Japan itself appears as a setting in the novel, I argue that Meiji-period interest in Shuihu houzhuan was related to its radically new mode of representing the central characters, who were transformed from rebellious bandits in the original Water Margin into civilized colonizers responsible for protecting and transplanting a reified Chinese essence on an international stage. This interest in expansion and colonization took on new significance against the backdrop of the First Sino-Japanese War, which bisected the publication of the translation and was explicitly addressed in both Mori’s commentary to the novel and the publishers’ marketing of the translation itself. In the context of the shifting relationship between Meiji-period Japan and Qing-period China, “Siam” is ultimately divested of its symbolic significance as a refuge from dynastic crisis and reconstituted as an unintentional trope for the complex linguistic, cultural, and political negotiation underlying Mori’s translation.