The Concepts of Politics and the Politics of Concepts: Translating Political Terminologies during the Fall of the Chinese Empire

Yuan Xi, University of Virginia
Siying Fu, University of Wisconsin-Madison

As scholars become increasingly interested in the long-term influence of empires on the social life and institutions of (ex-) colonies and post-imperial metropoles, a usually ignored aspect is knowledge. Along with the fall of empires and the independence of successor states comes the shift of epistemes and discourses (Foucault 2006). One of the most critical issues in the communication of knowledge between colonies and metropolises is translation (Robinson 2016). Although sociologists have delved into the cultural impact of empires on colonies (Connell 1998), the research on translation from the perspective of the sociology of empire is still insufficient. The sociology of translation primarily analyzes the social institutions and coordinated activities of producing a translated work and the meaning-making in this process. However, the competition between different translations and the political significance of such competition remain largely unexamined. Drawing on political sociologists’ work on ideas and institutions and studies on idea diffusion in the sociology of science and knowledge, our study aims to explain how the meanings and contexts of these newly introduced political concepts evolved and explore why certain translations prevailed over others from 1840 to 1937 in China, an era characterized by the invasion of foreign imperial powers, the collapse of Chinese empire, and the formation of a new Chinese state. Combining interpretive historical analysis with computational methods to scrutinize texts from over 50,000 newspaper pages and books cataloged in the National Index to Chinese Newspapers & Periodicals (Quan Guo Bao Kan Suo Yin), our preliminary research identifies five approaches for translating new terms, compares the relative popularity of different translations of a same concept in different periods, explore the changing meanings of these political terms, and examine the social origin and political consequences of translating political concepts in an unsettled time.

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 Presented in Session 129. The Politics of Language