Chinese Translation Company NoblePen

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Yangwu group, comprised of highly placed Foreign Affairs officials, initiated the translation of technical documents dealing with subjects like shipbuilding and the manufacture of weapons, and even established a number of translator training institutions. After the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, Yan Fu (1853-1921), one of the most important figures in the modern period of translation in China, was the most influential translator and translation theorist. Yan Fu was a cultural intermediary who, at a critical moment in history, sought to make European works of political and social science accessible to the people.
Born into a poor family in Fu Zhou, a port in the province of Fujian, Yan Fu attended a naval college and served on warships which took him to places such as Singapore and Japan. From 1876 to 1879, he was in Portsmouth and Greenwich, in England, where he had been sent with a group of naval officers who would later serve in the Sino-Japanese War. In England, he read philosophical and scientific texts voraciously. Upon his return to China, he was appointed director of the Northern Chinese Naval Academy, becoming vice-president of the institution in 1889 and president in 1890. After 1896, he supervised several translation institutes operating under central and local government authority. After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, he became president of the Capital Municipal University, later known as the University of Beijing.
Yan Fu was profoundly shocked by the humiliating Treaty of Shimonoseki of April 1895, which sealed China's defeat by Japan. Yan Fu was a patriotic and liberal intellectual, well aware of the dangers that threatened the entire nation. In 1896, he founded a newspaper in which he published a great many articles and editorials defending his political views. Yet it was through his translation, in particular his 1898 translation of Thomas Henry Huxley's Evolution and Ethics (1893) that he established a reputation throughout the country. His list of translations includes Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), published in Chinese in 1902, Herbert Spenser's The Study of Sociology (1872) and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859), both translations published in 1904, writings by Edward Jenks published in Chinese in 1904, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (1748), J.S.Mill's A System of Logic (1843), translated in 1905, and William Stanley Jevon'sThe Theory of Political Economy (1878), translated in 1909.
In the space of just then ten years, several of the major works of European political thought had been translated into Chinese. The impact of Yan Fu's work was well illustrated by the reception of Huxley's work. A biologist and supporter of Darwin, Huxley had applied the theory of evolution to society as a whole. Whatever the relevance of this method, there can be no doubt that for Yan Fu "struggle for life" and "natural selection" were concepts that met the needs of his country at that time. In his translator's notes, Yan Fu declared that the powers that had invaded and exploited China were morally and intellectually "superior," and that China had become "inferior" as a result of relentless international competition. If China did not fight for its own existence, it would succumb to ineluctable domination or genocide. As can be imagined, the translation of Evolution and Ethics set off a heated debate throughout the country, involving scholars, conservative bureaucrats and the Manchu aristocracy, and the schools, where the text was frequently used for instructional purposes and the "survival of the fittest" became a favorite essay topic.
Yan Fu was soon highly regarded by university intellectuals, becoming known as the person most competent to possess and communicate the essence of western knowledge. Two other factors may help explain Yan Fu's success as a translator: his choice of source texts and his excellent style. As he said himself, good translators must have a thorough understanding of the source texts, but they must be aware of the desires and expectations of their compatriots so they can select works appropriate to their time. Yan Fu's choice of language and style in the target language also won him many readers. He wrote in classical Chinese, which had developed during the Zhou (1100BC-256BC) and Han (221 BC-207BC) dynasties, eventually to became the language of the elite and which was still in use in all publications, official or otherwise. He also rearranged chapters and paragraphs so they would be consistent with the style of presentation and organization of ideas founded in the Chinese classics.Yan Fu was thus able to appeal to government officials, who at the time played an important role in national politics, and win their support.
Yan Fu won his reputation as a famous translator also as a result of his contribution to translation theory. He set down the triple translation criteria of "Faithfulness, Fluency and Elegance," which he called "Xin Da Ya" in the preface of the translated Evolution and Ethics. These criteria influenced the development of translation practice and theory for almost half a century after it came into being. "Faithfulness" requires that the meaning in the target language should be faithful to the meaning of the original; "Fluency" is the requirement of intelligibility of the target language text, the translated text should be in accordance with the language rules of the target language; "Elegance" requires a translation to be esthetically pleasing. There have been different comments and critiques of Yan Fu's triple criteria in the modern history of translation in China. Most translators or translation critics accepted Yan Fu's "faithfulness" and "fluency," but some thought that "Elegance" is not always valid.6 Take for example the context of a court trial, a man is sued for having said in English: "You are a damn fool," and it is rendered as: "Ni shi ge hen bu zhi hui de ren" (You're not a wise person). The translation has no doubt gained in elegance, but will certainly not be a faithful translation of the original and might even affect the outcome of the case. As for the second requirement, that of fluency, it is generally a desirable quality in a discourse, as for example when an interpreter translates for the doctor the inarticulate or incoherent speech of a sick person. However, in the case of a novelist or dramatist who is portraying differences in expressiveness in the speech of his characters, it will of course be inappropriate to translate all the dialogues with equal clarity and fluency.
Though there have been different opinions on Yan Fu's triple criteria, they have not been abandoned by translators in China. His theory successfully guided technical translation during the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China. Yan Fu, himself, with his translation output and translation theory, opened a new chapter in the translation history of China.