A Report On Translating The Perils Of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives Of Two Translators Between Qing China And The British Empire (Excerpts)

The source text of this translation project is excerpted from The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire.Published with Princeton University Press in 2021,the book was authored by Henrietta Harrison,a British sinologist based in Oxford University.In The Perils of Interpreting,Henrietta Harrison presents a nuanced picture,ingeniously shifting the historical lens to focus on Macartney’s two interpreters at that meeting—Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton.From the perspectives of world history and micro description,Harrison presents readers with the life stories of the two “cross-cultural mediators” for the Macartney embassy.Chapter 8-11 describe the story of Li Zibiao,a Chinese Catholic priest whom Lord Macartney recruited in Europe and brought with him to China.With “Thick Translation” as the theoretical framework,this report explores the application of explicit and implicit thick translation to historical biographical texts.On the one hand,explicit thick translation approaches,for instance,footnotes,illustrations and in-text annotations,are adopted.By doing so,the target text is expanded to a larger context.On the other hand,implicit thick translation methods,including amplification,specification and syntactic structure adjustment,are applied.Thus,the underlying nuances hidden in the source text are conveyed.The report concludes that thick translation theory is of good relevance in describing the translation process of historical biographical texts.This report also sheds new light on the roles of cross-cultural intermediaries between China and Britain on the eve of the Opium War.In Sino-British diplomatic negotiations,translators are endowed with great power because of their irreplaceable language ability and their status as “crosscultural intermediaries”,which also causes a far-reaching crisis of trust and puts themselves in danger.