Translation Formats
Throughout the nineteenth century, translations from Chinese were printed in a wide variety of formats. One format that was particularly popular, especially when we compare to twenty-first century practice, is that of the bilingual translation.
Here is the first page of Legge’s translation of The Analects of Confucius (Lun yu).
Legge’s translation displays several interesting features. First, Legge respects the typographical traditions of Chinese, printing the text in columns instead of rows, and organizing them from right to left, with punctuation marks outside and to the right of the text; the font of the Chinese text is also quite large, imitating the relative size of Chinese characters in well-printed, costly editions.
Second, the translation comes . . . second. It is printed in a much smaller font than the Chinese original, and looks crowded by comparison with the spacious layout of the Chinese. We may borrow the term hieratic from art history to explain how Legge’s typographic choices assert the primacy of the original Chinese and denigrates his own translation by comparison. The fact that it is only a couple of lines sandwiched between the Chinese and the footnotes doesn’t help either. The translation is literally subordinate to the original and at the same time supported by the extensive critical apparatus that unfolds in the footnotes, which are bilingual.
Below Legge’s translation come the copious footnotes, which are printed in double columns due to the small size of the font. The footnotes are bilingual. The footnotes for the first “chapter” (Legge’s term; we might call them sections or paragraphs) don’t fit on the first page, running over to more than half the space devoted to footnotes on page two. In general, Legge’s footnotes take up between one third and one half of the page. They are always longer than the translation and often taking up more space on the page than the English and Chinese combined, despite the fact that the type is significantly smaller.
The Analects in Chinese is not a long text, coming to approximately 15,900 characters (not exactly the same as 15,900 words, as some words even in Classical Chinese may consist of two or even three characters). If we exclude the extensive “Prolegomena” (137 pages), preface (5 pages), and indices (70 pages), the translation itself shrinks from a 500-page volume to 290 pages, of which any given page is no more than one-quarter translation – and often considerably less. This means that Legge’s translation is probably about fifty pages if typeset separately.
Although I have said that Legge’s bilingual editions of the classics are the epitome of this academic style, Legge was by no means the first to experiment with printing Chinese and English together. We can look back on several earlier attempts by Protestant missionaries from the first half of the nineteenth century.
Joshua Marshman produced the first translation of the Confucian Analects in 1809, nearly fifty years before James Legge. As we can see from the illustration, Marshman already has all the elements of James Legge’s later translation—Chinese text, arranged according to Chinese custom in columns right to left, translation below, followed by copious notes. Plus, he has the pronunciation in both Mandarin and Cantonese next to each of the characters, something that Legge does not bother to include in his version, and he numbers the characters in each section for ease of reference (to the left of each character; the numbers on the right of each character, above the pronunciation, indicate the tone). In this first section, he has a note for each individual character. Marshman also, like Legge after him, translates a biography of Confucius that he places before the translation.
Unlike Legge, Marshman divides the notes into two sections: those that are Marshman’s translations of Chinese commentary (mainly Zhu Xi, but also others), and his own additional explanatory footnotes. Including as he does a lengthy “dissertation on the Characters and Sounds of the Chinese Language,” as well as a comparison of his translation with an earlier Latin translation, Marshman’s book is almost twice as long as Legges, clocking in at a whopping 925 pages!
Marshman’s later 1814 Chinese Grammar includes an appendix with a translation of the much shorter Da Xue or “Great or Important Learning” (in Marshman’s words; Legge will shorten this to “Great Learning”). Marshman retains the bilingual format of Chinese followed by translation and notes, but here we see the Chinese text greatly reduced in size, not much larger than the English. Marshman’s notes on each individual character have also been moved to the end of the text rather than beneath each section and overall there are fewer notes, which means that this translation only runs to fifty-six pages.
Peter Perring Thoms was sent out to Canton by the East India Company to run the printing press that was used to print Robert Morrison’s Chinese Dictionary. While there, he learnt Chinese and published some translations that also employed a bilingual format. Although Thoms’s first translation, published in 1820, is in English only and contains a relatively restricted number of footnotes, four years later his Chinese Courtship In Verse (1824) broadly follows the format of Marshman’s 1814 translation of the Great Learning. It features the Chinese first, in a font size larger than the English, but not so extreme as Marshman’s 1809 translation, accompanied by bilingual notes, although these are nowhere near as numerous, perhaps because this is the translation of a love poem, not a canonical text, and so there is no commentary to translate. The notes are therefore mainly confined to explicating elements of Chinese culture that would be unfamiliar to Thoms’s readers and historical allusions. On page 1, as we can see, we find just such a footnote explaining just such an allusion in the text to the fable of the cowherd and the weaving maid.
Thoms’s Dissertation on the Ancient Chinese Vases of the Shang Dynasty (1851) is interesting for two reasons. First, it contains a double translation, or rather a double inscription; first the ancient form of the Chinese characters from the vase (nowadays we usually call these bronze vessels) is presented to the reader, then next to it is the same inscription but in a modern calligraphic font that, admittedly, is not very attractive; whoever Thoms had cut the characters did not have a very good sense of the rules of composition for Chinese characters. The most obvious problematic character is the last one in the first (right-hand) column, and the second and third characters in the third column (again, counting right to left, but there are numerous other characters that are, in the words of John Finnemore, “slightly off”). Second, the translations are folded into a larger commentary on the vases; in other words, the translations are part of a larger investigation into Chinese bronze vessels.
Walter Henry Medhurst’s 1846 translation of, as he titled it, the Historical Classic (Shu Jing or Book of History) also contains both the Chinese original and a translation, but in this case the two texts are intermingled to produce an inter-character translation, as we can see clearly in the first page of the translation, reproduced here:
As we can see from the first page, Medhurst’s translation contains numerous and lengthy footnotes, similar to Legge’s later translations. Indeed if anything, Medhurst’s notes are longer than Legge’s, with some pages containing only a few lines of translation or, in some cases as on page 16, none at all because the notes from the previous page run so far over that there is no space!
This manner of presentation makes it easy to see the extent to which Medhurst supplies conjunctions and other linking words in his translation. On page 14, pictured below, in the first full paragraph, for example, we can see that he has made five linking interpolations: “and”, “I find that”, “for”, “therefore”, and “however” in translating a total of only twenty-six Chinese characters. He has also supplied the pronomial “your” thrice.
We might say that Medhurst treats the Chinese texts in both these cases with utmost respect. However, in his slightly later translation of Pamphlets Issued by the Chinese Insurgents at Nan-king, Medhurst’s attitude is markedly different. Here only the English translation appears, with no notes. Medhurst only includes Chinese characters in some of the translations, and in these cases they are proper names (people and places). These are actually mainly from Chinese official sources (the Peking Gazette), not the writings of the rebels.
This is an example of a textual connection between translators.
