Publications
Publication details [#8328]
Wakabayashi, Judy. 2005. The reconceptionization of translation from Chinese in 18th-century Japan. In Hung, Eva, ed. Translation and cultural change: studies in history, norms and image-projection (Benjamins Translation Library 61). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 119–146.
Publication type
Chapter in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Source language
Target language
Abstract
Japan’s early adoption of Chinese texts for the education of the elite produced a special way of marking Chinese texts in accordance with Japanese syntax so that Japanese people who did not know Chinese could nevertheless read such texts. Whether this method of notation and reading called Kambun kundoku can be clasiffiied as a form of translation is a subject still under debate. Whether it had an influence on Japanese translation norms is perhaps even more worthy of investigation. This paper explains in detail the method of Kambun kundoku, investigates its status and traces its conflict with the budding paradigmatic shift towards what we tend to think of as ‘normal’ translation.
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