Translating Foreign Otherness

Cross-Cultural Anxiety in Modern China

Yifeng Sun

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351740838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores the deep-rooted anxiety about foreign otherness manifest through translation in modern China in its endeavours to engage in cross-cultural exchanges. It offers to theorize and contextualize a related range of issues concerning translation practice in response to foreign otherness. The book also introduces new vistas to some of the under-explored aspects of translation practice concerning ideology and cultural politics from the late Qing dynasty to the present day. Largely as a result of translation, ethnocentric beliefs and feelings have given way to a more open and liberal way to approach and appropriate foreign otherness. However, the fear of Westernization, seen as a threat to Chinese cultural integrity and social stability, is still shown sporadically through the state's ideological control over translation. The book interprets, questions and reformulates a number of the key theoretical issues in Translation Studies and also demonstrates their ramifications in a bid to shed light on Chinese translation practice.

1 Translation and cross-cultural anxiety

The antithesis between familiarity and otherness is fundamentally linked with translation. Central to translation in the Chinese context is anxiety and ambivalence about foreign otherness, which is essentially reified in ideology. The cultural politics of difference has much to do with truth-telling, sincerity, intelligibility, and empathy, all resulting from direct interaction with the other. Effective translation depends not only upon a reasonable understanding of the content of the message to be translated, but also on an ability, on the part of the target reader, to relate that message to the relevant cultural situation by developing a necessary knowledge of foreign otherness in its cultural political context. The artifice or artificiality of sameness or alleged authenticity entails turning away and reduction, while cultural impositions are understandably considered as intrusive, and, thus, debates on literature and translation, often politically and ideologically charged, generally center around what foreign otherness is capable of doing or undoing. Notwithstanding the prevailing political conditions of the target system, translation may introduce and embrace foreign political and ethical values. Whatever the case may be, displacement caused by translation opens up significant interpretative and transformative possibilities. Equally noteworthy is that increasing transnational mobility has profound implications to the perceived composition of otherness.

1 Understanding otherness

Translation activities are infused with traces of otherness centrally reflecting the different, unfamiliar, unrecognizable, and alien. Foreign otherness in relation to traditional Chinese cultural values is the forcible reminder of difference embodied in otherness. As observed by Richard Kearney: “We need, at crucial moments, to discern the other in the alien and the alien in the other” (Kearney 2003: 67). Other traditions and practices epitomize previously unknown otherness, and, for this reason, the otherness of different perspectives, epistemological, social, aesthetic, or linguistic, is made visible and represented in translation, which has subsequently shaped the cultural landscape of China. Both the familiarity and strangeness of the other can be engaging and empowering, as a result of which the irreducibility of the otherness of the other has gradually gained matrix in the cross-cultural history of modern China. While otherness is constantly rewritten, a different sense of self has come to the fore, together with a different manifestation of otherness.

It is particularly meaningful to examine how foreign otherness, though initially and thereafter from time to time perceived as useful and desirable in China, leads inexorably to suspicion, and, thus, the question concerning how it is related to cultural politics inherent in translation needs to be addressed. Admittedly, foreign otherness may elude understanding and acceptance. And, effective translation not only depends on establishing a reasonable level of understanding of the source text, but also demands a certain ability on the part of the target reader to relate the translated message to the relevant cultural situation. The efficacy of reading translation grows from understanding foreign otherness, but a sense of estrangement due to its exotic and alien attributes seems to be unavoidable, and translation is fraught with tensions arising from the juxtaposition of similarity, dissimilarity, and specificity that frequently represents cultural difference. It is the specificity of cultural difference that both entices and defies the attempts made by the target reader to make sense of the translated text. Moreover, cultural strangeness is interspersed with enduringly unsettling signs of unintelligibility, from which arises the danger of rendering translation a pointless effort.

China lacks a philosophical thinking about the need to seek to understand otherness, and to allow the exclusion of the other has long been part of a tradition. Prior to the Opium War that started in 1850, foreign otherness had been treated with derision, and foreigners, especially Westerners, were dismissively called “barbarian”. In the self-delusion of the world center, China had little consideration of the existence of the Other. Such insularity, however, was made obsolete soon after the outbreak of the Opium War. In fact, a general awareness of foreign otherness began to manifest earlier: Yinghuan zhilue (A brief survey of the maritime circuit), a collection of geographical writings in Chinese translation published in 1844 functioned to de-center the self-centered China. To de-center the self meant an eventual willingness, no matter how painful, to be exposed to foreign otherness. Meanwhile, more translations reinforced the awareness of the Other, and the exclusion of foreign otherness from the Chinese discourse was no longer credible. Consequently, there was an inevitable realization that China was just part of the world. The accelerating need for an ever increasing amount of translation forced China to be in further contact with foreign otherness. Then, the ontological otherness represented by translation was played out in reading and thinking on the part of the target reader, proving to be a transformative force in terms of self-discovery and better understanding of the other. And discerning the otherness through reading translation became a part of Chinese cultural life. The importance of otherness as a relational concept was finally established and began to influence Chinese cultural life.

At the semantic level, translation entails exposing the target reader to foreign otherness, and the act itself is a learning process of trying to make sense of the different, unfamiliar, and strange. Nevertheless, the outcome of translation may be some loss of intelligibility, and the possibility of experiencing unintelligible otherness bedevils the production and reception of translations. In view of the strangeness of foreign culture, understanding otherness is a significant precondition of making translated texts accessible and comprehensible. In this regard, there is an interesting paradox and conundrum: the target reader needs to be allowed to contact otherness through accessible translation; but if accessibility is achieved at the expense of accuracy, what is made available to the target reader is a diluted or distorted otherness – a prospect vehemently dreaded by Lu Xun.

Although translation aims at intelligibility in order to fulfill the basic requirement of effectively communicating to the target reader, often, different levels of intelligibility are produced, especially in the absence of an appropriate degree of foreignization as the governing strategy of translation. Chinese translation practice has been in favor of the pursuit of authenticity, and in connection to it, foreignization strategy is seldom far away from the horizon, although it is always viewed with a watchful eye! Admittedly, despite its apparent advantage in a cross-cultural sense, foreignization runs the risk of rendering a text uninterpretable or much less interpretable. A text is only interpretable to those who can relate it to a text world – a reality that derives from the text in question. In view of the change in the prevailing circumstances, some simple and easily interpretable expressions in the source text become somewhat uninterpretable after foreignized translation. However, the nature of foreign otherness may be clarified by noting how enigmatic it becomes in relation not only to cultural experience but also to the way in which difference is articulated and perceived. It should also be pointed out that diverse kinds of otherness, linguistic, cultural, formal, social, political, and aesthetic, can all contribute to communication problems.

Moreover, in order to avoid otherwise dysfunctional translations attributable to inadequate mediation, it is vital to produce, not without considering the variability of readership, a translated text that is interpretable in a general sense within a different linguistic and cultural context. It means that originally restricted codes need to be tackled in such a way that they can be understood within a different cultural framework. Obviously, just transposing two different sets of codes is far from enough. Codes are related to specific conventions that normally cannot be forcibly relocated – although they can be forcibly replaced at the expense of the otherness of the other – across cultural boundaries irrespective of linguistic and cultural differences. One unstable and destabilizing factor is that the historical, cultural, and political conditions of interpretability are often different in the target system, particularly in the case of English and Chinese. However, reading may or may not be based on interpretation, and if we accept Heidegger’s view that interpretation is understanding made explicit, then it can be said that implicit understanding is possible without recourse to interpretation, let alone translation, which is an explicit form of interpretation, requiring a tacit commitment to meaning. As argued by Taylor Carman, “most of our understanding is tacit and unthematic” (2003: 21–22). The immediate concern is possible unintelligibility caused by a heightened sense of difference, and if a translation is not semantically valid, its practical value tends to diminish. Due to the ontological primacy of difference, the fabric of intelligibility is not reducible, and translation is a provisional way of understanding, which is normally used to reduce semantic uncertainty and indeterminacy. Although alternating between both types of implicit and explicit understanding, it is generally observed that translation exhibits a tendency to move towards various levels of semantic explicitness.

Yet, since there is no way for translation to circumvent foreign otherness, it must involve attempts to understand, interpret, perceive, and confront it. Precisely due to its relatively unknown nature, otherness can be exciting, and produce a refreshing, powerful impact. In effect, a contact with otherness, uncertain and even risky as it may seem, offers a natural temptation. However, foreign otherness does not seem to travel well, and can potentially result in various kinds and degrees of misunderstanding with significant cultural political implications. Because of difference in many related aspects, be they formal or political, the communication of meaning becomes semantically vulnerable and putative sameness uncertain and precarious. Undeniably, modernity, rationality, and universality are supposed to be found in foreign otherness to necessitate the search for different kinds of sameness or similar kinds of otherness. On the other hand, behind the meticulously constructed façade of resemblance or commensurability between the source and target texts, tensions generated by different cultural political values in terms of otherness lead to all forms of intervention or even invention so as to break out from the constraints of inhibition in a bid to overcome untranslatability, real or potential. The resulting cultural political fragments are textually and contextually connected as an overarching feature of translation, through which they influence the thinking of the target system.

How otherness is made accessible has always been a direct challenge to the translator. The necessity to introduce and understand foreign otherness was underlined by the late Qing translation practices trying to enable the target reader, albeit in a filtering operation, to encounter various forms of cultural otherness. Yan Fu’s strenuous efforts, through translating Western scholarly works, to instill into the Chinese culture, which was thought to be moribund and increasingly constraining, became the centerpiece of cross-cultural understanding and transnational exchange. Evidently, the otherness was viewed as a powerful political force in addressing the pressing needs of China. Similarly, searching for truth from the West was the driving force of Lin Shu’s feverish translation activities as well. His ultimate motive in translating a dazzling range of literary works was to “save his nation” (Wang 2004: 78). As part of his strategy for national salvation, the otherness of the advanced thinking served the very purpose of self-understanding. But it is noteworthy that it was a diluted or de-foreignized form of otherness that was presented, because of his pertinacious insistence on the translation strategy of overt domestication. It can be seen that the terms of representing foreign otherness were thus uncompromisingly negotiated by the translator and sanctioned by the target reader. Significantly, the enriching function and inherent value of otherness were recognized and exemplified in the large quantity of translated texts during the late Qing dynasty.

2 Anxiety about otherness

China has long found itself in a complicated ambivalent position about foreign otherness, which is both palpable and elusive, and, due to its dual nature of excitement and alienation, it has generated anxiety in both senses, eagerness and apprehensiveness, and the varying combinations of them further compound issues of cross-cultural ambivalence. In the case of China, translation is known to be motivated by its compelling needs to learn about other cultures, and an interest in knowing about the foreign may well derive from an unflagging curiosity about mysticism or exoticism. For China, previously inaccessible or unarticulated aspects of human experience are potential sources of both refreshment and trepidation. In a paradoxical way, its willingness to embrace foreign otherness is rooted in its history of being humiliated by foreign powers. Thus, a generalized wariness of undue foreign influence has been exhibited from time to time. With the West, China has long had a love and hate relationship. While the connection to otherness is deemed fundamentally correct, ambiguities and tensions between self and other continue to occur in the process of interacting with the world. The surprise of otherness, either pleasant or unpleasant, is enhanced by a new form of ignorance activated as manifestation of difference. Still, the otherness of other cultures has a decisive impact on the perception of supplementary modes of existence, in which self is pitted against other. It cannot be denied that the irreducibility of otherness stems from the very nature of translation, which is predicated on introducing cultural difference to the target language.

With traumatic experiences of vulnerable relations with the Other, China has continued to suffer the pangs of alienation in fear of being othered through extensive encounters with the West representing different cultural values and beliefs. Though anxious to learn from the West, the Chinese want to draw a distinction between good and evil aliens. It is clear that to completely surrender to the other amounts to the negation, destruction and enslavement of the self. In experiencing strangeness, it is not uncommon to be pathologically driven by otherness to result in fearing the other. It has been pointed out that “ ‘self-center’ is a natural inclination. The important thing is to avoid self-focalization on the grounds that everything around self is no more than accessories of ‘selfhood’ and casing a look of hostility on foreignness” (Cai and Shen 2011: 121). The question raised by Richard Kearney is: “How can we tell the difference between benign and malign others?” (2003: 67). Whether it is possible to tell the difference between them has become a continual source of anxiety as well. Self and other are related contiguously, and Dan Zahavi has another question: “Do we understand others in analogy to ourselves, that is, does self-understanding have primacy over the understanding of others, or is the understanding of self and other equally primordial, basically employing the same cognitive mechanisms?” (2014: 99) Whatever the answer to this question, it proves the inseparableness and also inseparability of self and other. The fear of otherness, particularly its unknown part(s), typically assumes subtle forms of exclusion as a sign of intolerance and resistance. In terms of experiencing the foreign, otherness signifies, to a large extent, quintessential authenticity. For this reason, reduced or simplified otherness invariably compromises authenticity.

In the late Qing Dynasty, traditional Chinese cultural values and practices were closely guarded, not to be eroded by foreign cultural influences, and because of this concern, authentic foreign otherness was conceived as untrustworthy, and in order to reduce potential resistance, ethnocentrism, tacit or otherwise, prevailed as a safe translation strategy. Since authenticity was not a major concern in relation to the supposed cultural superiority that pervaded Chinese society, the target reader, mostly ignorant of the source language, rarely questioned the authenticity of the translated works, and because sinicizing foreign references was very common, the target reader could easily be under the illusion that what they read were the Chinese original. Many translators did not even provide the names of the original authors, and literary translations were usually published under a pen name or anonymously; this practically ruled out the possibility of comparing the source and target texts. Again, the passive target reader was beguiled with the illusion of sameness brought on by excessive domestication galvanized by the narcissistic regression of a proud civilization. Significantly, a deeply rooted aesthetic prejudice against foreign cultures was also related to the strategic need of the translator to dilute and filter otherness in order to preclude potential resistance from the target reader.

There has been a constant oscillation between “good” and “bad” otherness in modern Chinese history. During the late Qing period, China became increasingly anxious to establish contacts with the outside world, yet was somewhat wary of erosive foreign cultural influences at the same time, which, rather dramatically, were soon mightily reinforced by a radical plea for wholesale Westernization immediately after the May Fourth Movement. In the 1950s, mainly driven by ideological motives, American culture was banished as bad otherness, whereas the Soviet embodied good otherness, hence the massive translations of Soviet and Russian literature. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, after a decade of the Cultural Revolution, China was once again anxious to resume contacts with the rest of the world, particularly the West, but for a while, the so-called “cultural fever” fueled by reading translations was to meet with the clamp-down campaign against “spiritual pollution” from the West. As a result, the supposed good otherness was declared as bad or not so good once again. Fortunately, the campaign did not last long and its aftermath was not too damaging.

Undeniably, it is difficult to foretell the nature of problems created by allowing an alien other to live inside oneself, particularly for the seriously disadvantaged with a colonial history of cultural political marginalization – China always claims that it suffered a semi-colonial past. In effect, the essentially ambivalent nature of China’s encounters with foreign powers is reflected in the term “semi-colonial”. The outcome of translation may appear alarmingly analogous to the target reader being made vulnerable to all possible kinds of infections when they are exposed to the outside world. In fear of being harmed by corrosive alien forces, cultural protectionism has been designed to counteract alienation and colonization thought to bedevil the home culture. Similarly, because the unknown as a manifestation otherness is intimately connected with difference, the possibility of a word being given a different meaning in another context affects the stability of semantic understanding and cultural political assumptions. Therefore, the negative perception of otherness prompts an impulse to attempt reduction or exclusion in translation. This cultural distrust may well be related to “the temptation to discriminate between good and evil others …” (Kearney 2003: 68). It is indeed easy to succumb to the usual temptation to demonize what is construed as evil others as a natural reaction to the unfamiliar.

To establish linguistic and cultural intimacy with otherness heightens the awareness of the close interaction between self and other. To proceed from the unknown to the knowable and then to the known is an arduous and intricate process of cultural exchange. This anxious engagement with foreign otherness is hazardous and unsettling but also potentially rewarding and beneficial. Translation is known to be inseparable from culture and can consequently create tensions and conflicts. Cultural translation cannot avoid translating cultural otherness, or the otherness of other cultures. Translation is a forceful agent of cultural change in the course of opening up new cultural and political spaces, suggestive of loosening hegemonic racial identities and structures. Since the cultural and ideological influence of foreign culture can be powerful enough to cause social and political changes, the possibility of cultural invasion poses a subversive challenge to the target culture, ultimately leading to chaos or confusion. The continuous upshot of translation encourages an attitude that is critical of an existing order and its received interpretation. Cultural variations can be confusing and deceptive, and different cultural perceptions bear on the way in which the specific properties of cultural forms serve different political and cultural interests. Western otherness, for instance, may be taken as a universal to be imposed on a given home culture, which is then forced to conform to an alien culture and alien reasoning. In view of this potential danger, anti-foreign campaigns have been launched over and over again in China to stamp out what is identified as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: translation in China
• 1 Translation and cross-cultural anxiety
• 2 Authenticating translation
• 3 Diaspora and foreignizing translation
• 4 (Un)translatability and cross-cultural readability
• 5 Violence and translation discourse
• 6 Opening the cultural mind
• 7 Attitudes, feelings, and affective interactions
• 8 Translation in the age of glocalization
• Conclusion
• Index