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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2017
When Christian values fall into the hands of translators, how are these Christian values represented in a non-religious or areligious target culture? How do the translations reflect the conflicting ideologies of the time and of the individual translators? This article will examine Lin Shu's major translations of The Merchant of Venice in early twentieth-century China, an important period when reform of Confucianism encountered imported Western ideals. Close textual analysis of the translation produced by Lin Shu, a Confucian literatus and a reformist, reveals that religious content in English literary works was manipulated, Christian references often being omitted or adapted. This study illustrates the translator's strategies, picking and choosing what to domesticate in the translated work to suit his ideology, and how a society's expectations and ideologies shape the translation product. The analysis offers some perspectives for understanding how the translator's linguistic and religious roles and ideologies shaped the Chinese Shakespeare, and how the religious values were re-presented in early twentieth-century China.
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5 He was a leading figure in early translation history in China and regarded as on a par with another reputable early translator, Yan Fu, who translated, among other works, Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics.
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9 Lin Shu's Yinbian Yanyu and his translation of other Western literature show evidence of Confucianization, giving the characters in Shakespeare a Confucian twist.
10 Robert Compton, ‘A Study of the Translations of Lin Shu' (PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1971), 99.
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13 Compton, ‘The Translations of Lin Shu’, 200. In 1961, Ying had reprinted a collection of translations of Western novels from the late Qing Dynasty: Ying, A. (Cun, Qian Heng), ed., Wan Qing Wen Xue Cong Chao [Translations from Foreign Literature], 4 vols (Shanghai, 1961)Google Scholar.
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28 There are three Hebrew roots that are frequently translated ‘mercy’, which carry the meanings of (1) the kind of love which is mutual and dependable; (2) the ‘womb's love’, i.e. the love of mother for a child; and (3) ‘grace’ or ‘favour’, i.e. a free gift. The New Testament builds on the Old Testament conceptualization, and three Greek roots underlie the English translation of ‘mercy’: mutuality, sympathy and the major weight of the physical feeling of mercy. For fuller discussion of the theology of mercy, see Komonchak, J. A., Collins, M. and Lane, D. A., eds, New Dictionary of Theology (Dublin, 1987), 650–2Google Scholar.
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32 The translations of the quotations of Guo and Cao are taken from Ruru Li, Shashibiya, 16.
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46 See J. Wong, ‘The Translatability of the Religious Dimension in Shakespeare from Page to Stage, from West to East – with Reference to The Merchant of Venice in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan’ (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015), for fuller discussion of the translatability of religious works in China from the early twentieth century to the contemporary period.