The Publication Of Yan Fu’s Translations And The Study Of His Translated Terminology

Yan Fu is the most renowned enlightenment thinker, translator and educator in modern China. This article aims to clarify publications of Yan Fu’s translations and his translation activities and takes the General Index of English-Chinese Translated Terminology of the Complete Works of Yan Fu as the corpus to make a full analysis of Yan Fu’s translated terminology. This article aims to make contributions to solving or remedying certain problems that have been taken no notice of in the research on Yan Fu by looking at him through a different perspective.Yan Fu’s "eight great works" were published in so many editions in such a short time. This was indeed exceptional in the history of the Chinese publication. Yan Fu’s translated terminology was soon recognized and widely spread in the translation circle and had huge impact on translation work. His contributions to translation of terminology, hence to translation itself can never be overestimated.Yan Fu started his translation in the late period of the Qing Dynasty, when the New Cultural Movement had not begun and the vernacular Chinese had not been advocated and therefore the classical Chinese was the only writing form. When he translated Western academic terminology with the classical Chinese, he strictly followed the traditional principles in the traditional context. When the vernacular Chinese gradually came to be popular, Yan Fu’s translation also became easy to understand with its more modern style, very clear, concise, and direct for the ordinary reader, which shows that Yan Fu had already had a full consideration of the linguistic change that went hand in hand with the social development. As shown in examples of his translations, Yan Fu employed different methods such as transliteration and "old translation" to popularize his translation. It is true that some of his translated terms have been replaced or discarded by more modern or better translated ones, but many of his translated terms are still currently in use, as is shown in the present study. The main reason why his translated terminology has disappeared does not lie in the problems of his translation, but in the fact that linguistic contexts have changed with social progress, especially with the gradual perfection of the Chinese Pinyin system. Even those words that have disappeared from our daily life today they are of great historical value in term of the study of the Chinese language and the history of the Chinese society; for it recorded social information and historical marks of that time, and it has become the memory of the Chinese language for the whole century. It added plenty of new elements to the Chinese words corpus, which provides invaluable information for researchers of later generations who would like to study the change in Chinese, especially in formation and use of the new Chinese words. Considering the ideological change his translated works have brought about and his translated terminology that involves new concepts and new ideas, Yan Fu was indeed a great translator, educator and enlightenment thinker.