Missionary Translators

Translations of Christian Texts in East Asia

Jieun Kiaer, Alessandro Bianchi, Giulia Falato, Pia Jolliffe, Kazue Mino, Kyungmin Yu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000473193
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Exploring the history of missionary translation of Christian texts in East Asia, Missionary Translators offers a comparative perspective between the features of East Asian languages and the historical context of the translation. Focusing on the Bible and Christian theological works, it looks at the intersection of linguistics, translation studies and history. This book discusses the real-life challenges faced by missionary translators in producing Christian texts in East Asian languages.

Students, historians, scholars and those interested in the study of East Asian cultures or translation will find this book to be an insightful and invaluable resource.

1 Language learning and negotiation

The experience of Jesuit translators in late imperial China

Giulia Falato

DOI: 10.4324/9781003032342-1

Introduction

The history of translation and interpreting in China is intrinsically entangled with the discovery of the ‘Other’ and the necessity to conduct mutually beneficial negotiations, whether of a commercial, diplomatic or broader political nature. Despite the prominent role played by language mediators or ‘tongue–men (sheren 舌人)’ (Cheung 2016, 36) in government affairs over the course of seventeen centuries, details of their origin and background are quite sparse in Chinese traditional historiography.¹ One possible reason for this scarcity of information could be found in the condescending attitude that various dynastic rulers and government officials held towards non-Han cultures over time; it was only when the country’s involvement with foreign powers increased that decoding their tongues became essential to understanding—and taking advantage of—Western scientific and technical knowledge. It is not surprising that the years following the Opium Wars (1839–1842/1856–1860), which saw the coercive opening of Chinese ports to international trade and a growing presence of Western nationals in the Qing territory, correspond to the heyday for translation activities in China. However, the so-called introduction of Western learning (xixue dongjian 西學東漸) did not originate in the nineteenth century. Its roots are much older and date back to the activities of two major non-Chinese groups: the Buddhist sutra translators, who in the second century arrived at the Chinese capital from the Western Regions² and launched a ten-century-long translation movement, and the Jesuit missionaries from Europe.³ The latter were an order of erudite men who made education and language acquisition the main tools to propagate the Gospel. They managed to enter China in 1583 after three failed attempts and established an enterprise lasting more than a century that was based on accommodating Christian teachings to local customs (accomodatio) and evangelising via publications in the Chinese language. Although the Jesuits were by no means the first nor the last foreign agent in the history of the Sino-Western relations, their activities and contribution to the dissemination of European knowledge have attracted the interest of scholars of different backgrounds for decades.⁴ This is probably due to their frontline role in a number of key historical events, such as the transition between the ‘conservative’ Ming and the ‘foreign’ Qing dynasty, of Manchu origin in 1644 and the shift in global powers, which saw the influence of the Portuguese Padroado (Assistancy) in Asia slowly decline over the seventeenth century to be replaced by France and Britain (Cheung 2016, 122). In the space of just over one hundred years, the Jesuits demonstrated an impressive readiness to adapt to these changes: they learned the Manchu language to honour their teaching duties with the Kangxi 康熙 emperor (1654–1722) and coped with new policies issued by the French authorities and an increasing shortage of funding and manpower. The Jesuits did this while attending to their pastoral duties, preserving their positions at the Astronomical Bureau in Beijing, and defending themselves from occasional attacks from inside and outside the court.⁵ In the meantime, they never neglected their literary endeavours: from early catechisms and a corpus of scientific publications aimed at engaging the literati, to the Rites Controversy—which revolved around their accommodation policy and the rendering of key religious terms in Chinese⁶ —translation was truly a permanent presence in the Jesuit China mission and the main pillar upon which their activities were based. For this reason, while not denying the paramount contribution of missionaries such as the Protestants, Franciscans and Dominicans to the dissemination of Christian doctrine in late-imperial China, this study focuses on the Jesuits’ work and approach to translation. It provides a brief overview of the significance of language learning in St Ignatius’ order and on how the pioneers of the China mission approached the Chinese language and its acquisition. It then looks at how the linguistic and cultural competence of the missionaries resulted in specific translation choices, while not neglecting the collaborative nature of the translation and the role of local literati in the negotiation of a new vocabulary. Finally, it examines how the use of phonemic loans evolved in two essential catechisms belonging to two very distinct stages of the missionaries’ presence in China: João da Rocha’s (1566–1623) Tianzhu shengjiao qimeng 天主聖教啟蒙 (Primer of the Holy Christian d octrine, 1619) and Francesco Brancati’s (1607–1671) Tianshen hui ke 天神會課 (Lessons for the Congregation of Angels, 1661). This paper proposes to demonstrate that, while linguistic negotiations often resulted in the exploitation of pre-existing terms to translate concepts of foreign origin, the use of phonemic transcriptions to render religious terms was generally considered the ‘safest option’ to maintain doctrinal purity and slowly became systematised. Moreover, while the ‘question of terms’ has always been a key preoccupation of the Jesuits’ translation works, the authors’ inclinations to prefer phonemic loans to other translation options can also hint at their attitude towards the accommodation policy.

‘La più equivoca lingua e lettera che si ritruovi:’ Chinese language in the eyes of Western missionaries

Language learning can undoubtedly be considered the ‘transversal theme’ that connected and drove Jesuit enterprises around the globe (Brockey 2019, 389). Its paramount role in the missionaries’ formation, to support their understanding and expounding of theology, was clearly stated in Ignatius de Loyola’s (1491–1556) Constitutiones Societatis Iesu (Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, 1558), one of the fundamental documents for the regulation and administration of the Society (Constitutions, 1996, 150–156).

In the words of António Vieira (1608–1697), St. Ignatius’s Society of Jesus acted as a novel Babel Tower, where all languages were ‘acquired and purchased at the cost of much study and great labour, and therefore with many and great merits.’ (Brockey 2019, 391). Such an endeavour was also well-framed in the context of the main geographical discoveries of the period, enabling St. Ignatius and his confrères to bring their missionary contribution to the newly-discovered worlds in Asia and the Americas. As a matter of fact, both the Constitutiones and the Society’s official study plan, the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu (Method and System of the Studies of the Society of Jesus, 1599) show evidence that young Jesuits were exposed to language learning, particularly to Latin, Greek and Hebrew, during the earliest stages of their literary formation: these were not only aimed at permeating the message of the Holy Scriptures, but also at cultivating outstanding oratorical techniques. Moreover, the ability of engendering specific beliefs in the listener by means of logical persuasion was a more than desirable competency in a prospective missionary; to this end, pupils spent the earliest years of their education honing their linguistic and rhetorical skills on Cicero or Aristotle’s writings.⁷

If the acquisition and use of ‘línguas estranhas’ were universally considered crucial tools in ‘preach[ing] the Gospel, propagat[ing] the Faith and expand[ing] the Church’ (Brockey 2019, 390) all around the globe, their importance was even more vital in the case of the China mission. Ever since Alessandro Valignano’s (1539–1606) arrival to Macau⁸ —an outpost of foreign presence in Ming territory— in September 1578, he immediately understood that in order to ‘open the doors that lead to the Gospel, … there was no other possible way than studying the Chinese language and written texts’ (D’Elia, 1942, 141). It was this intuition that paved the way for the establishment of the Jesuit mission in the Chinese territory by Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) in 1583, which resulted in a renewed presence of foreigners at the court of the Ming emperors and the introduction of European science, philosophy and religion through the publication of around 450 books in Chinese in just over 100 years (Hsia 2007, 39–51).

The unifying value of the written language in China, which had for centuries contributed to develop and maintain a strong cultural identity, particularly among the official elite of the country, is a feature that did not escape the eyes of the earliest foreign travellers. During a brief visit to Canton in 1556, sixteenth-century Dominican friar Gaspar da Cruz (1520–1570) highlighted the cohesive component of the Chinese script and its political significance, providing a depiction that echoed the notion of koiné (κοινή) in ancient Greece:

In China there are many differences in languages, for which reason many don’t understand each other’s speech, but they understand each other’s writing as do likewise the inhabitants of the islands of Japan, who understand the Chinese through their writings, although they have a different language.⁹

Additional features, which pertained to the morphology or the use of characters, were picked up by other European authors during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Gonzáles de Mendoza (1545–1618) and Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who correctly understood and emphasised the intrinsic entanglement between mastering the script and having access to communication, a privilege that was generally limited to educated officials (De Francis, 1984, 85–88). Exhaustive descriptions of the ‘Mandarins’ language’ or guanhua 官話 inexorably appeared in the Jesuits’ proto-ethnographic works about China that circulated in Europe, starting from Matteo Ricci’s De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas (On the Christian Expedition in China), translated from Italian by Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628) and published in Augsburg in 1615. Undoubtedly, Ricci’s account set the trend for all the future relazioni from China, contributing to consolidating more or less accurate beliefs associated with late Ming culture and society. He correctly indicated language and written texts as a fundamental part o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Language learning and negotiation: The experience of Jesuit translators in late imperial China
• 2 Jesuit translation practices in sixteenth-century Japan: Sanctos no gosagueo no uchi nuqigaqi and Luis de Granada
• 3 The making of the Korean Bible: A case study of James S. Gale’s New Testament and Genesis translations
• 4 A translation designed to guide: Campbell N. Moody’s Pe̍h-ōe-jī or Romanised Minnan Taiwanese New Vernacular Translation of and Commentary on Romans I-VIII (1908)
• Index