On The Science And Technology Co-translation In The Ming And Qing Dynasties From The Perspective Of The Sociology Of Translation

Translation,as a practice to satisfy the communicative needs among people who speak different languages,is bound to be socially-situated.Co-translation,a special translation activity completed by two or more translators in cooperation,is characterized by its social features.In the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties,Jesuit missionaries came to China to translate western sci-tech works together with Chinese scholar-officials to advocate religious belief,which opens the prelude to sci-tech co-translation.With the mission of spreading the gospel of God,the sci-tech co-translation activities in the period are distinguished by strong religious coloring.In the middle and late Qing Dynasty,China’s closely-shut door was forced to open by western powers.Opening their eyes to perceive the world,some enlightened intellectuals tried to pick up advanced science and technology from the West in order to strive for self-improvement,out of which demand,official and private translation institutions were set up,used mainly for translating and publishing.And the translated content gradually expanded from such natural sciences as astronomy,mathematics and chemistry to such social sciences as political system and logical theories.The sci-tech co-translation practice lasts for more than 300 years,leaving us not only numerous translated texts,but also far-reaching influence on the social progress.Following the “cultural turn” in the translation studies,the Sociology of Translation mainly studies the two-way interaction between translators as agents and the social structure through translation practice to reveal translators’ passivity and agency.The Sociology of Translation changes the paradigm of traditional translation studies in which translating is confined to the transformation between linguistic symbols to explore the social attributes and social significance of translation via a macroscopic perspective.Drawing on the core concepts of Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice Sociology with such key words as “field,capital,habitus” and their interrelation,the thesis aims to study the two-way covariance between co-translation and social structure.On the one hand,from a diachronic perspective,it explores the covariant process of sci-tech co-translation activities under various fields in the Ming and Qing Dynasties.It is found that co-translation modes go through the stages of emergence,development,prosperity,decline and re-prosperity in a succession.And in this process,the co-translators,the content and language of co-translation have also changed as the external representations of the interaction between translators and other agents within various fields of society.On the other hand,the thesis tends to review the influence of co-translation activities on the social structure by analyzing such indispensable social fields as the cultural field,the educational field and the political field respectively.It is found that great changes have occurred in those social fields,which verifies the considerable social significance and social value of co-translation.Therefore,these findings can provide reference to the global popularization of Chinese culture.