Translating the Bible into Chinese

TThe translation project of the Sigao Shengjing 思高聖經 was developed by Gabriele Allegra, given the absence of a complete Catholic Bible in the Chinese language. Allegra started to translate in 1935, and in 1945 assembled a team of Chinese Friars to revise the Old Testament and translate the New one. Subsequently, a biblical research centre was founded, and from 1946 to 1961 it published the first Catholic Bible in Chinese in eleven volumes. The single-volume version was issued in 1968. This paper will present the translation process and the features of the Sigao Shengjing. A brief presentation of the translations of the Chinese Bible will precede a description of the general characteristics of the biblical text. Moreover, the phases of the translation and the publication of the Sigao Shengjing will be examined through the analysis of archival material and the main characteristics and features of the first Chinese Catholic Bible will be outlined.

Another Type of ‘Old Tales Retold’

This papers deals with Zhang Ailing’s (1920-1995) posthumous novel, Xiao tuanyuan 小团圆 (Little Reunions), written in the ’70s of the last century but completed just before her death, finally published only in 2009, which is an example of the continuous manipulation of the same narrative materials used in previous works, and re-presented here through a politics of self-translation and self-intertextuality. In translating this novel one is confronted with a complex “mosaic of quotations” as Kristeva says, and self-quotations, and is dragged into a forest of meanings derived from the juxtaposition of a variety of external ‘voices’ that mix up with the internal voice of the author. This Bachtinian or babelian quality of the novel, in other words its pluri- and interdiscursivity, challenges the translator, who is called not only to reconstruct the original sources of the allusions, but is also caught between the need of disambiguation and the respect of the intertextual connections implied by the text; he/she has also to cope with the deliberate narrative fragmentation adopted by Zhang.

Translation During the Christian Century in Japan

This essay presents examples of translation of keywords of the Christian doctrine translated by Jesuit missionaries during the so-called ‘Christian century’, when Europeans undertook the conversion of the Japanese, between the second half of the 16th century and the first part of the following. The purpose is to highlight the difficulties of translation between very distant and different cultures, and the strategies that were devised in order to overcome the problems.

Metaphors and Translation

The question of the translation of the figures of speech is a debated and complex field of studies. In the present work, after a brief introduction, I propose to ponder over with concrete examples on the translation of some figures of speech (metaphor, comparison and hyperbole) from Persian into Italian, taking as a source and representative text a passage from the poem Khosrow o Širin by Neẓāmi Ganjavi (XII century). This is a text of extraordinary imaginative and creative power, which represents a hard challenge for a translator, especially at a rhetoric level. Through the analysis of some verses that describe the pain of Princess Širin, I will try to verify methods, possibilities, strategies and defeats for their translation into Italian.

Interdependencies Between Literature, Language and Translation in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century China

This paper focuses on specific concepts and modes of translation practised during late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century China. Its Author does not argue for the uniqueness of a ‘Chinese Translation Studies system’ but asks critically why European scholars of Translation Studies sometimes show a lack of ‘empathetic imagination’ in accepting the contributions of Chinese protagonists to the field of Translations Studies. The paper suggests that one reason for this kind of negative attitude might be the belated arrival of the ‘iconic turn’ in the West. The last part of the paper examines the relations between translators and the socio-political developments in China as well as their identity as world-citizens.