Worlds Without Translation: Premodern East Asia and the Power of Character Scripts

Abstract

Alphabetic writing is often considered the ultimate goal in the evolution of writing systems. Against the backdrop of this popular prejudice, this essay presents some distinctive advantages of Chinese characters and calls for a more serious attention to script in translation studies. It explores how the Chinese script shaped cultural traditions in East Asia, enabled dimensions of literary expression closed to alphabetic scripts, and made possible a multilingual East Asian “world without translation” where special reading techniques of Chinese texts using vernacular glossing (called kundoku in Japanese) and face-to-face communication through writing (so-called “brush talk”) made translation unnecessary. The essay concludes by suggesting how early Japanese and Latin literatures – otherwise comparable in their regard for their respective mother cultures China and Greece – launched onto different paths, in part due to the different nature of their script. Attention to script promises to widen the theoretical scope of translation studies decisively.

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