Intralingual Translation, Diglossia, and the Rise of Vernaculars in East Asian Classical and Premodern Cultures (1/2)
Résumé
China and sinicized East Asia are often considered having a comparatively poor record in matter of translation during the classical and premodern periods (before the end of XIXth c.), if we except the Buddhist and Jesuit times. Moreover, the common use of Chinese writing in the so-called “Sinographosphere” (China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam + many ancient countries) is sometimes believed to have created a “space without translation”. These oversimplistic views, relying on a narrow definition of translation limited to the interlingual, are not only fallacious, but miss a crucial point: that areas of the Sinographosphere gave rise to a huge and durable space of intralingual translation practices, in the context of enduring situations of diglossia or pluriglossia. No attempt to try and define intralingual translation should be made without the crucial East Asian input.
Motivated by this feeling of a deep epistemological void awaiting to be filled, both presenters have launched an international program, now underway, gathering specialists of East Asian countries working in various fields such as Buddhism, the genesis of Classics, the commentarial tradition, writing/rewriting processes in literature, duscursive strategies in diglossic/pluriglossic situations, spreading of knowledge... A related workshop is programmed in Paris end of 2016, with publication of a collaborative book as final goal.
This part of the talk will give a general presentation of the project and expose briefly the issues of the various contributions. The theoretical benefit expected from this collaborative work is a more accurate and better documented definition of intralingual translation.
This is part 1/2 of a joint presentation. In part 2/2, copresenter Barbara Bisetto will illustrate the topic at stake through a concrete example.