Promoting discipline of translation
During Japan's self-imposed isolation (1639-1859), Nagasaki was the country's only port open for international trade: merchants from two nations, Holland and China, were granted access. While in Nagasaki, the Dutch and Chinese were each confined to their own tightly controlled districts: on Dejima Island 出島 (from 1639) and in Tōjin yashiki 唐人屋敷 (Chinese Quarter, from 1689) respectively.
Is translation indispensable or expendable? Is it a necessary evil and a constant reminder of our limitations or rather a powerful way of enlarging our understanding and experience? Is translation always benign, beneficial and positive or can it turn into a sinister, malign and ethically dubious activity?
Charges of Eurocentrism have been troubling the TS scholarly community lately, leading recently to a prominent countercharge in the pages of Translation Studies from Andrew Chesterman, who argues that science is always universalist, and that cultural relativists who accuse scholars like him of Eurocentrism are therefore simply wrong.
In the light of current translation studies scholarship, Southeast Asia is largely underresearched compared to other parts of Asia. Translation traditions in a region so diverse in politics, geographies and cultures such as this cannot easily be accommodated by established notions of literal vs free, domestication vs foreignisation, or the post-colonial pattern of appropriation, resistance and hybridity.
Joan Riviere's article "Womanliness as a Masquerade" will form the basis of a discussion of the late Qing intellectual and noted translator Ku Hung-ming. Specifically, this paper will argue that, just as some women can be seen as performing 'womanliness' as a masquerade, so too we may theorize the translations of Gu Hongming as a type of masquerade, a conscious adopting of a role that draws on pre-existing norms relating to that role.
Hong Kong film maker Evans Chan lives between Hong Kong and New York, making films and writing about Hong Kong to an international audience and reader. The inter-lingual, intercultural and inter-medial conditions face by both Evans Chan and Pema Tzeden are representative of contemporary creativity.
誠如西方學者所言，儘管當今的描寫翻譯學研究已經取得長足的進展，然而由於戲劇翻譯問題之複雜，並且缺少令人滿意的解釋性理論，迄今就其展開深入研究的甚少。此種情形同樣適用於當今中國的戲劇翻譯界。當代西方翻譯理論家蘇珊•巴斯奈特曾反覆強調，文本功能是翻譯的中心問題。落實到戲劇翻譯領域更是如此。巴斯奈特尤其重視戲劇文本的可表演性(performativity)、可言說性(speakability)和讀者/觀眾的接受問題。
Translation is one of the core practices through which any cultural group constructs representations of another and contests representations of the self. Part of its power stems from the fact that as a genre, it tends to be understood as "merely" reporting on something that is already available in another social space, that something being an independent source text that pre-exists the translation.
《法句經》於三國時期由著名譯經家支謙譯成中文，由支謙所撰的《法句經序》，更是中國現存最早論及翻譯理論的文章，其翻譯風格對後世的佛經翻譯不無影響，因此，此序對中國譯學研究別具意義。講者先作文獻考索，試圖探索博極群書、晚年專精佛學與佛經翻譯的梁啟超，為何無視《法句經序》？講者繼而嘗試探討《法句經序》的文本價值 ── 支謙既無意為學，此序怎成中國譯學開山之作？
This seminar will begin with a few minutes of live Tai Chi demonstration to the accompaniment of a strain of non-Chinese music, to illustrate how the flow of energy enables a 'stigmergy' among the faculties of a human body, both physical and spiritual, to bring about a kinaesthetic experience of articulation in a yin-yang response to the rhythm of the music.
