The Shift of Directionality in Translation Activities in China (2011-2020)

Abstract

Translation as an intercultural and interlingual activity is in the progress echoing synchronously the social, economic and cultural development of a country. In the long recorded history of China, translation has played an irreplaceable role in political, cultural and economic exchanges between China and other nations. By way of reviewing the long history of translation activities in China from the Han Dynasty to the 21st century, it is found that the directionality of translation from foreign languages into Chinese (FL-C) has kept over thousands of years until the late 10 years have witnessed the reversed directionality in translation. After perusing literature review together with quantified translation works and the comparative study, the four high tides with the dominant FL-C translation are periodized in the span of thousands of years and much focus is given to evidence and justify the shifted directionality of Chinese into foreign languages (C-FL) translation activities from 2011 to 2020. Aided by the quantitative and qualitative analysis, this article makes an in-depth exploration of C-FL translation activities from three major aspects, that is, main fields and target languages in translation industry, the government funded projects for publishing C-FL translation works, and the major publishing houses for C-FL translation works, and it also has a further elaboration of the shifted directionality of translation under the framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s(1984, 1986) sociological theories on the field and the capital.