Transplanting Kanji from Japanese: Secondhand Translations of Robinson Crusoe in Korea [Not invited]
Tetsuya Hattori
Japanese Studies Association of Australia Biennial Conference: Celebrating Diverse Perspectives 2019/07 Public symposium Monash University, Caulfield, Victoria, Australia Japanese Studies Association of Australia
Wang Xiangyuan argues transplanting kanji from source text, particularly Japanese one, into Chinese translation as one of the ways of “Transfer Translation”(迻译), which occasionally fails to make sense. In addition, Korean translators also transplanted Kanji from Japanese text into their works.
Kim Chan(金欑)’s translation of Robinson Crusoe “絶世奇談 羅賓孫漂流記” in 1908 shares a lot of Kanji with a preceding Japanese translation “絶世奇談 魯敏孫漂流記” in 1883 by Inoue Tsutomu(井上勤), which apparently indicates the source text, for instance. However, Inoue had contextualized Robinson Crusoe as a success story, as Takahashi Osamu pointed out, translating “rambling thoughts” into “ambition”(桑弧の志). Crusoe, in Daniel Defoe’s original text, foolhardily went to sea against his father’s will, and that led him to retrospection and confession. Instead of Christianity, “ambition,” originally “桑弧蓬矢,” a word taken from “The Book of Rites”(礼記), a core text of the Confucian canon, was centered. Taking Kim’s secondhand translation as an example, I will discuss transplanting Kanji as problematics of cultural translation.