This ground-breaking volume on early modern inter-Asian translation examines how translation from plain Chinese was situated at the nexus between, on the one hand, the traditional standard of biliteracy characteristic of literary practices in the Sinographic sphere, and on the other, practices of translational multilingualism (competence in multiple spoken languages to produce a fully localized target text). Translations from plain Chinese are shown to carve out new ecologies of translations that not only enrich our understanding of early modern translation practices across the Sinographic sphere, but also demonstrate that the transregional uses of a non-alphabetic graphic technology call for different models of translation theory.

About the Author
Li Guo teaches Chinese and Sinophone literature and culture, as well as Asian cultures at Utah State University. She is the author of Women's Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China (Purdue University Press, 2015), and Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction (Purdue University Press, 2021). Patricia Sieber is an associate professor of Chinese and director of the Translation and Interpreting Program at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000, the lead editor of How To Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2022) and a co-editor of How To Read Chinese Drama in Chinese: The Language Companion (under advance agreement). Peter Kornicki is Emeritus Professor of Japanese, Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He earlier taught at the University of Tasmania and Kyoto University. His monographs include The Book in Japan (1998) and Languages, Scripts and Chinese Texts in East Asia (2018). He is a Fellow of the British Academy. Matthew Fraleigh is Associate Professor of East Asian Literature and Culture at Brandeis University. He has published New Chronicles of Yana_x0002_gibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West: Narushima Ryuhoku Reports from Home and Abroad (Cornell, 2010) and Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryuhoku and the Uses of Chinese Tradition in Modern Japan (Harvard, 2016). William Hedberg is an associate professor of Japanese literature at Arizona State University. His first book, The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon, was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. His second project focuses on travel, cartography, and representations of the foreign in early modern East Asia. Ye Yuan is a literary and cultural historian who specializes in early modern Japanese and Chinese literature and culture, Sinitic studies in pre-1900 East Asia, vernacular literatures, and the Sinophone and Sinograph. Her current research projects include works on Ming-Qing Chinese popular fictions and their transmissions and transformations in East Asia, and the enthusiasm for colloquiality and contemporality in Sinitic cultures. Nguyen To Lan is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sino-Nom Stud_x0002_ies, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences. She was a Visiting Scholar and Coordinate Research Scholar at Harvard-Yenching Institute (2013-2014, 2015), a Guest Scholar at Kyoto University (2014), and a Visiting Scholar at Academia Sinica (2018) and at Beijing Foreign Studies University (2019). Her publications include monographs on royal theatrical scripts of the Nguyen Dynasty (2014) and the adaptation of the Miaoshan story in Vietnamese literature (co-authored, 2021) as well as articles in Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. Ross King serves as Professor of Korean at the University of British Colum_x0002_bia. A student of Korean in all its historical stages of development, he is particularly interested in the history of Korean ideas about language and writing, and in how Koreans before the twentieth century participated in the broader Sinographic Cosmopolis. Si Nae Park is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Park examines how the interplays between cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic and vernacular Korean shaped literature, linguistic thought, and the materiality of texts. Her current book project examines Literary Sinitic as a heard language. Xiaoqiao Ling is Associate Professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. Her main field of interest is late imperial Chinese literature with a focus on performance texts, vernacular fiction, and print culture. She has published in both Chinese and English on fiction and drama commentary, the legal imagination in literature, and memory and trauma in seventeenth-century China. Young Kyun oh is Associate Professor of Chinese and Sino-Korean at Arizona State University. Young Oh works on the cultural connection among East Asian societies with a particular focus on the language and the book. He has published in both Korean and English on the linguistic histories, Sinitic literacy, and the culture of books of East Asia. Xiaolu Ma is an assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. A native speaker of Chinese and fluent in Japanese and Russian, she engages in rigorous research and teaching in the areas of transculturation and world literature.

Reviews
''This welcome book introduces translation of vernacular languages in the context of the multi- and bi lingualism of East Asia and South East Asia during the period between 1600 and 1900... A strength of the book is its scholarly in-depth research on particular translations. In other ways too, this volume is extremely valuable... I hope this volume will contribute to a meaningful dialogue between different groups of scholars working on translation.''
- Nana Sato-Rossberg, International Journal of Asian Studies , 2 May 2023





Book Information
ISBN 9789463729550
Author Li Guo
Format Hardback
Page Count 326
Imprint Amsterdam University Press
Publisher Amsterdam University Press