Translation Research On The Technical Term Jihe In The Ming Dynasty From The Perspective Of Conceptual History

During the second translation upsurge in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties,a large number of terms representing new concepts were introduced into China,among which the technical terms,bringing in either a new discipline or a new system of an existing subject,greatly promoted the development of science in China.As translators,Xu Guangqi and missionary Matteo Ricci invented and borrowed tremendous terms to express those concepts,among which jihe was the most representative one.As the title of the Chinese version of Euclid’s Elements,or Jihe Yuanben,it has attracted the attention of scholars not only in translation study but in mathematical history,who has proposed a few inferences about its meaning.However,they tend to focus only on Jihe Yuanben and draw their conclusions by mere textual comparison.As an emerging paradigm in historical study,conceptual history focuses on the concept itself and enquires into the process of the emergence and evolution of the concept.From such perspective,this paper explores the process of the introduction,definition and change of jihe,attempting to break through the limitations of existing studies and to provide new ideas and conclusion.The paper is based on the theoretical framework put forward by Koselleck and Sun Jiang and diachronic analysis and synchronic analysis are conducted.Resorting to comparing and contrasting the usage of jihe by Matteo Ricci in his translations and that by other missionary translators,and gathering data from the corpus,the author analyzes how the technical term jihe was introduced in the Ming dynasty,what it means in Jihe Yuanben and how its derivatives change in relevant texts,obtaining the following findings.(1)In order to introduce a new set of ontology different from that of Neo-Confucianism,in Tianzhu Shiyi Matteo Ricci introduced ten categories of Aristotle,one of which was quantity that was translated as jihe.The translation was recognized by other missionary translators such as Aleni and Furtado.Besides,as the core of mathematics of the west at that time,jihe made its way into China through the introduction of the knowledge framework.(2)As the translation of quantity,in the first version of Jihe Yuanben jihe was used as the hypernym of magnitude and number,which were translated as du and shu respectively.With intentional changes in the structure of the tome,Ricci tried to extend the ratio theorem to number,which was applied only to magnitude in the past.(3)Judged from the derivatives of jihe in the same semantic field,be it from the preface of Jihe Yuanben by Ricci or translations by missionary translators other than Ricci,the correspondence between jihe and quantity can be observed.Schall was the only exception,who attached the meaning of jihe only to magnitude.Tracing the history of jihe and with comprehensive analysis,the author describes and analyses the introduction,definition and evolution of it from the perspective of conceptual history.The author hopes the thesis can serve as a reference for the research of translation history and the utilization of conceptual history in the field.