Since the reform and opening up, translation has become a bridge between China and the world. General Secretary Xi Jinping sent a letter congratulating CIPG on its 70th anniversary, stressing that it is necessary to better introduce China in the new era to the world, better show the true, three-dimensional and comprehensive China, and make new and greater contributions to China's journey to the world and the world's understanding of China. This points the way for the translation community to establish a career. The extensive translation practice needs the support of theory, translation research has become a field of study for scholars, and the development and improvement of China's translation research system is still one of the important theoretical pursuits.
Translation studies is a comprehensive discipline that draws on the relevant theories of other disciplines to study translation problems. Interdisciplinary research can effectively expand the academic space, and interdisciplinary translation research emphasizes the integration, interaction and cooperation between disciplines, which is groundbreaking, inclusive and open. Since the fall of the new century, the pace of interdisciplinary research on translation has accelerated, various "translation studies" and new theories of translation studies have followed, and knowledge production has flourished. However, the influence of the translation discipline still needs to be expanded, and it cannot be limited to the discourse in professional circles, but it is necessary to discuss the depth and breadth of interdisciplinary translation research.
The rise of "translation studies" under different names
At present, the breadth of interdisciplinary translation research has been significantly extended. There are 61 kinds of "interdisciplinary disciplines" such as "×× translation" or "translation ××", involving 20 or 30 kinds of disciplines such as philosophy, aesthetics, hermeneutics, ethics, sociology, ecology, geography, communication, education, linguistics, psychology, economics, political science, thinking, security, literature, culture, semiotics, cognitive science, and communication. The intersection of any of the above disciplines and translation science can constitute a new "translation science", such as the intersection of philosophy and translation science constitutes the philosophy of translation, the intersection of security and translation science constitutes translation security, and the intersection of sociology and translation science constitutes social translation or translation sociology, etc., but it is only self-contained and self-justifying. In addition to the above disciplines, there are anthropology, religion, narrative science, metrology, media, customs, information theory, cybernetics, fuzzy theory, game theory, orientalism, digital humanities, game science, cognitive neuroscience, biosignifics, computer science and computational linguistics.
With such a broad intersection of translation studies, how effective is the study? Huang Zhonglian and Wang Xiaoman believe that interdisciplinary research is mostly in the stage of concept borrowing research, that is to say, interdisciplinary translation research is still on the surface of conceptual borrowing research, and has not yet solved the problem in essence by deeply analyzing the internal relevance of various disciplines. This is a question of the breadth and depth of the intersection of disciplines, and the author's investigation confirms this conclusion.
Using 61 different titles of "×× Translation Studies" or "Translation ×× Studies" as keywords, the cumulative number of their respective articles over the years is queried on CNKI to explain the degree of attention and research status of scholars. By the end of 2021, there are five types of ecological translation (2868 articles), translation aesthetics (1194 articles), social translation science (also known as translation sociology, a total of 226 articles), corpus translation (183 articles) and translation poetics (163 articles). Ecotransference and translation aesthetics publish the most, standing out among members with common attributes. According to the prototypical category theory, 61 "translations" belong to the same category and have "familial similarity". Category members are divided into center members and edge members, and members with more common attributes (members have overlapping attributes) are center members. After the test of time, among the 61 kinds of "translation science", ecological translation, translation aesthetics, social translation (translation sociology), corpus translation, translation poetics, etc. belong to the members of the center, have common attributes, and are generally concerned by the translation community. In detail, these kinds of "translation studies" do represent different and effective approaches to interdisciplinary translation research.
Self-creation, inheritance, introduction and localization
Ecological translation is a successful example of interdisciplinary research, and its translation theory is often associated with interdisciplinarity. Ecological translation science was originally guided by the "adaptation/selection" theory in Darwin's theory of biological evolution, and explored the interrelationship, basic characteristics and laws of translator choice and adaptive behavior in "translation ecological environment". Starting from Hu Gengshen's paper "A Preliminary Study on the Theory of Adaptive Choice of Translation" at the 3rd Asian Translators Forum of the International Translation Federation in 2001, it is a research paradigm that describes translation from the perspective of new ecological theory to describe translation from the perspective of new ecological theory. Ecological translation is currently the most influential theory in the mainland translation community, and it is constantly maturing. It initially borrowed the theory of survival of the fittest to explain and give birth to the knowledge form and discourse system of translation science, constructed a knowledge form that can be self-explanatory, and then drew theoretical elements from the new ecology to generate a discourse structure that can speak for itself, and gradually formed a conceptual framework characterized by the interdisciplinary research of ecology and translation. But much interdisciplinary translation research is a simple "relocation" of concepts with little success.
Translation aesthetics is an interdisciplinary discipline of translation science and aesthetics, and is an example of inheriting the classic aesthetic ideas of the mainland. In 1986, Liu Miqing put forward the basic theoretical concept of translation aesthetics, that is, the use of basic principles of aesthetics to analyze, interpret and solve the aesthetic objects, aesthetic subjects and aesthetic relationships in interlingual transformation, which is a study of the general laws of aesthetic experience in translation activities, a discussion of aesthetic reproduction means and the standards of translation beauty. On this basis, Liu Miqing's Introduction to Translation Aesthetics in 1995 inherits traditional Chinese aesthetic thought, clarifies the four-level aesthetic system of perception, imagination, understanding and reproduction of translation aesthetics, emphasizes the content, means and procedures of translation aesthetic reproduction, and proposes the theory of translation aesthetic empathy, which is a relatively comprehensive and systematic research result of translation aesthetic thought in the true sense of China. The book comprehensively reveals the aesthetic origin of translation, explores the special significance of aesthetics to translation, understands the scientific and artistic nature of translation from the perspective of aesthetics, and uses the basic principles of aesthetics to propose aesthetic standards for translating different styles, analyzing, interpreting and solving aesthetic problems in interlingual conversion. On the basis of fully understanding the basic attributes of the translated aesthetic object (original text) and the aesthetic subject (translator), the aesthetic composition of the object and the translation energy of the subject are analyzed, the relationship between the aesthetic subject and the aesthetic object is clarified, and the types and means of aesthetic reproduction in translation are provided to guide the translation practice. Liu Miqing believes that if aesthetics has a profound role in promoting the history of Western translation theory, then the relationship between Chinese translation theory and aesthetics is more close and lasting. Traditional Chinese translation theory is closely related to philosophy-aesthetics from theoretical propositions to methodology.
In the past ten years, mainland scholars have worked hard to absorb the essence of traditional Chinese philosophy and literary theory, applied the "I Ching" thought, Hehe Thought, "Taoist Theory", etc., combined with traditional Chinese translation theory, reconstructed the interpretation system of translation and the discourse system and academic system of Chinese translation, and produced new theories such as "Hehe Translation", "Symbiotic Translation", "Article Translation", "Great Easy Translation", and "Yi Translation". Unfortunately, it is not an easy task to use the past for the present and to discuss the present by borrowing the past, and the above doctrines have not yet been widely accepted by the translation community.
Corpus translation is an example of "introduction + localization". Different from the path of ecological translation and translation aesthetics, corpus translation takes the localization path of "introduction" first, and then digestion, application and development. Mona Baker pioneered the corpus-based approach to translation research, writing as early as 1993 the Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Meaning and Applications, and began to lead the establishment of the English translation corpus. Drawing on the concept of corpus linguistics, Wang Kefei took the lead in advocating translation research based on corpus, and adopted the empirical methods of intra-language comparison and inter-language comparison to discover and interpret the common characteristics of translation. Wang Kefei was the first to put forward the concept of corpus translation in China: "Corpus translation science is guided by linguistic theory in terms of research methods, takes probability and statistics as the means, and takes the bilingual real corpus as the object, and conducts diachronic or synchronic research on translation, which represents a new research paradigm." This definition clearly expounds the research objects and research methods of corpus translation, and focuses on observing, analyzing, and describing the essence of translation, the translation process and the translation phenomenon from the perspective of linguistics and translation theory, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of corpus translation science.
At present, the research of Chinese and Chinese database translation is constantly innovating in terms of corpus scale, development technology, processing depth and diachronic compounding, and is at the forefront of international research. Many units and even individuals in China have built corpora with different purposes, different scales and different standards. For example, according to the needs of cultural "going out", CIPG and other units have presided over the construction of a corpus with a certain scale that can be used for translation research and query, such as the "Standardized TermBase for Foreign Translation of Discourse with Chinese Characteristics" and the "'Chinese Keywords' Multilingual Foreign Information Dissemination Platform".
Social Translation Studies (Sociology of Translation) is another example of "introduction + localization". It was first developed by James S. Holmes) raised it in the article "The Name and Truth of Translation", but it did not attract attention. Until around the 21st century, more and more scholars paid attention to translation studies from a sociological point of view. The translation community holds special international conferences and publishes anthologies, borrowing the concepts of symbol production, field, capital, symbolic commodities, habits and illusions of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, aiming to study the translation behavior in the context of the grand society, to explore the socio-cultural factors behind it and the relationship, role and interaction between the various translation intermediaries; to regard translation as a social phenomenon, not just a problem of translation between languages; to examine translation in a larger field. Emphasize the restrictive role of social system on translation, highlight the interaction between translation and society, power and discourse, and form a sociological research model of translation. Drawing on the mainstream ideas and methods of sociology, the sociology of translation has become a new path of translation research at home and abroad, injecting new vitality into translation research.
The data shows that "enterprise translation science", "military translation science", "illustrated translation science", "translation thinking", "translation semantics", "translation education", "translation economics", etc. have been published for many years, but few people have asked about it, some "translation science" keyword data is even zero, and some "translation science" only sees one or two related papers. In addition, "national translation studies", "knowledge translation studies", "ecological interpretation studies", etc. were created in 2021, and the data is temporarily vacant, and whether they can take root in future translation research is still unknown.
We are not data-onlyists, and we cannot just look at data regardless of the nature and type of discipline. Ecological translation, translation aesthetics, corpus translation, and translation sociology all take translation practice as the object of research, put translation in different contexts, and use other disciplinary principles or modern means to investigate, combining theory and practice, injecting new vitality into translation research. These sub-disciplines touch on the essence of translation, dredge up the mechanism of translation, and answer the questions raised by translation practice, so there are many students and researchers. A few branches such as "meta-translation science" (or "meta-translation science"), "theoretical translation science", and "translation philosophy" are metaphysical studies divorced from translation practice, with profound theories and niche subjects, relatively few people pay attention to research, and naturally produce few papers.
Correct understanding of interdisciplinary translation studies
Breadth and depth are the two dimensions that measure things. For translation research, "breadth" requires that the theory can cover all kinds of phenomena covered by translation, and "depth" requires direct access to the essence of translation. Translation is a complex and diverse social activity involving authors, originals, translators, translators, readers, patrons, editors, publishers, etc. The phenomenon of translation and translation itself is characterized by pluralism, complexity and universality, so translation research needs to be "broad". Translation studies is also an academic activity. Scholarship is a systematic and specialized study, a disciplinary demonstration of existence and its laws. A single theory cannot effectively demonstrate the translation motivation, translation thinking, translation process, translation acceptance, and various phenomena that affect translation in a certain social and cultural context, in addition to factual argumentation, it is also necessary to learn from the theoretical models and research methods of other disciplines and demonstrate from different perspectives. This involves the question of the depth of the argument or research. In interdisciplinary research, it is either a cross-disciplinary integration of multiple disciplines that borrows a few terms from other disciplines and labels a few labels.
Currently, translation research has breadth but no depth. The boundaries of translation research are overextended, and the target objects of research have a tendency to be "decentralized". More and more references and perspectives are being made to related disciplines, and researchers have begun to construct self-explanatory knowledge forms. Scholars are constantly looking for new breakthroughs in the tide of the times, exploring new forms of existence, presenting new forms of knowledge, and various forms of "translation science" continue to emerge, bringing translation research to their respective fields. As a result, the growth of knowledge presents scattered islands, seemingly scattered, but in fact they are irrelevant. In addition to the deep integration of linguistics and translation science, which has long been mature, it is the knowledge system of ecological translation, translation aesthetics, corpus translation, and translation sociology that needs to be cited and discussed.
The interdisciplinary study of translation requires both objective and subjective initiative. "Learning" originally refers to the knowledge of a certain category of systems, such as physics, chemistry, philosophy, biology, etc. As the division of knowledge becomes more and more detailed, self-contained propositions and theories are also called "learning". The second-level disciplines below the first-level disciplines and the third-level disciplines under the second-level disciplines can be called "learning". As a result, the discipline of translation has endlessly derived various "learnings". Facts have proved that only a few "×× translation studies" or "translation ×× studies" are beneficial to the construction of translation disciplines.
There are roughly three models for the interdisciplinary study of mainland translation studies: First, "top-down", that is, to examine the phenomenon of translation from a philosophical perspective, to the essence and value of translation, to clarify the fundamental understanding of translation, and to take traditional Chinese philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic thought as its theoretical characteristics. Translation aesthetics, translation philosophy, ethical translation, interpretive translation, etc. belong to this model. Second, "bottom-up", that is, summarizing and summarizing the practical experience of translation, conceptualizing and categorizing, and refining and sublimating theories from actual experience, such as language translation and interpretation. The theories produced by this model are often not called "learning", such as Huang Zhonglian's "theory of transliteration", Xu Yuanchong's "Theory of Three Beauty", and Fang Mengzhi's "Applied Translation Research". Third, "borrowing chickens and laying eggs", that is, drawing on the concepts, categories and theoretical frameworks of related disciplines to create new interdisciplinary disciplines. This model has been common in the past one or two decades, such as the translation of economics by economics, and the translation of geography by geography. Scholars used to use the "top-down" model, which was characterized by fragmentation of translation theories and the collection of armpits. They rely on perception and practical learning, search from the sidelines, study short and long, go forward and follow, and the essence of translation is passed down from generation to generation, becoming unified in its own right. For example, luo Xinzhang's four concepts of "case book - seeking faith - god-like - transformation of the realm" have become an important part of the mainland translation theory system.
Translation studies is a practical and highly applied discipline. Translation theory can be divided into three levels according to function and source: macro, meso and micro. Macroscopic theory pays attention to the general and fundamental problems of translation, and the guidance of translation practice is mainly at the level of methodology, values, epistemology and translation ideology; meso theory is dominated and regulated by macroscopic theory, which is the theory of the transition from macroscopic theory to microscopic theory; microscopic theory comes from practice, is constrained and regulated by meso theory, and is used for translation operations. There are interdisciplinary researchers who are good at making a big splash in macro theory, but disdain micro techniques, and lack systematic research on meso strategies. The study of translation strategies (a term introduced at the end of the 20th century, previously collectively referred to as "translation methods") belongs to the Middle Way research, with the aim of bridging macro theory to translation practice. Foreign self-contained translation theories have corresponding translation strategies. For more than 20 years, "translation strategy" has gradually become the first high-frequency word in the keywords of mainland translation research. Foreign strategic theories such as naturalization and alienation, explicit concealment, and rewriting can also explain the phenomenon of Chinese translation to a certain extent. Many translation methods in mainland China originate from bottom-up deduction, induction and synthesis, as well as the conceptualization and categorization of experience, which has always been the main and strong point for scholars to study translation. For example, in the ancient translation theory, "five non-translations", "厥中", and "huitong", in modern translation theory, "to replace the steps", "to achieve the purpose", "to take into account both sides" and so on. However, these translation methods are not very effective for some researchers who hold the banner of interdisciplinarity, and the reason is either that the commentators neglect to practice and do not have the understanding and spirituality of translation, or lack systematic scientific research literacy, or are at a loss for traditional translation theory. Contemporary Chinese translation theory is not without creation, but there is a big gap with the vigorous development of the translation industry.
Translation researchers often have linguistic or foreign literary backgrounds, but it is not easy to integrate with other disciplines. There are now some people who don't know much (or don't understand at all) other disciplines, who claim to be doing interdisciplinary research, but in fact just rub the heat of interdisciplinary translation research. Interdisciplinary research in translation is the norm, running through different levels of translation theory, paying attention to the breadth and depth of interdisciplinarity, and being cautious in "breadth". It is no exaggeration to say that translation is inextricably linked to the modern and contemporary disciplines of the mainland, but it is not to see the wind or the rain, to see the hunter's heart, and to "cross" the past with a slight relationship. We should respect the word "learning", not every "cross" must be called "learning". Interdisciplinary research should go deeper from the surface of borrowing concepts and terms to the deep integration of interaction and mutual penetration between different disciplines and translation science.
(This paper is a phased result of the major project of the National Social Science Foundation of China "Research on the History of the Development of Chinese Translation Theory" (20&ZD312))
(The author is a professor at the School of Foreign Chinese, Shanghai University)
Editor: Liu Yan