Chinese Translation. A Brief Historical Survey and Pedagogical Considerations

Adopting a generally diachronic perspective, this study seeks to map the main theoretical contributions that have addressed—through different approaches and from diverse angles—the specificity of translation from and into Chinese within European-language Translation Studies. To tentatively reconstruct the evolution of scholarly attention to these issues, the paper traces the main stages that led from an early focus on linguistic translatability alone, through the cultural and postcolonial turn, to the outlining of as comprehensive a picture as possible of the current state of the art. A final section is also devoted to reflections on the implications of a deeper awareness of debates on Chinese translation for the teaching of comparative translation history and theory.