Rethinking Yan Fu's Tianyan Lun

The publication of Tianyan Lun has provoked a century-old debate centering on a three-character criterion "faithfulness", "expressivity", and "elegance" Yan put forward in a routine note on the translation, and paradoxically, Yan's practice as a translator has been overlooked.Right from its very origin, translation has been serving a diversity of purposes. Translation by nature is a purposive, rhetorically realized, socio-cultural activity. A given rhetorical situation gives rise to a translator's intent to turn a text from one language into another, and it restrains the production and reception of the translated text as well. A translation, from this perspective, ought first of all to be thought about as the translator's response to this situation and manipulation of this situation. Tianyan Lun is no exception. Its significance lies not so much in Yan's proposal of the so-called "three-character criterion" as in Yan's capability of discerning the social exigence, identifying the competent target audience, selecting effective source material and adopting the most appropriate strategies to realize his purpose.Engulfed in a grave national crisis, China in Yan Fu's time was in urgent need of new ideologies to provide theoretical guidelines for her self-reform and self-strengthening. Yan Fu, responsive to the exigence, integrated Huxley's idea of "the struggle for existence" with that of "the survival of the fittest" by Spencer in his "translation" to urge the Chinese people to change their way of thinking and doing things. The rhetorical purpose and the given situation constrained Yan's translation also. In consideration of a domestic cultural environment entrenched in Confucian ideology, Yan deliberately "acclimated" Huxley's Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays by changing the pronoun, theme, language style of the source text, substituting its culture-specific allusions with domestic ones, redesigning the textual grid, so as to produce a significantly "naturalized" version of Huxley's work in Tianyan Lun. Moreover, to spur the Chinese people to struggle for existence, Yan modified the original theory of evolution by supplementing comments, examples and annotations and excluding elements not conducive to his...