英文摘要 |
Dao An (312/314-385) was one of the most prominent theorists in earlyChinese translation history. His most popular teaching of wu shi san bu (五失三不) has caused numerous debates since the Jin dynasty. To understand thedebated issues, I examined all his sutra prefaces collected within the Collectionof Records Concerning the Translation of Tripitaka (出三藏記集) in order of compositionand came to a preliminary conclusion that Dao An's thought could beperiodized into an initial and a mature phase, and that the key to understandingthe change in his thinking was the Translation Forum (譯場) in the capitalcity Chang-an (長安). Taking this previous study as an example, the presentpaper goes a step further into the Translation Forum to investigate the specificelements that might have caused the change in his thinking. According to mystudy, the Translation Forum produced not only Buddhist sutras but also earlytranslation theories. In a sense, it was a cultural, religious and political institutionin which Buddhism was transmitted, Buddhist sutras were translated, andtranslation discourses were negotiated. More importantly, this paper shows that,within this social institution, those who participated in the process of sutratranslation, especially Zhao Zheng (趙政), the government official in charge ofthe Forum, and other participants, presumably the patrons of the Forum, hadthe tremendous power to decide which sutras would be translated and whattranslation strategies would be applied. Translation, according to André Lafevere,does not occur in a social vacuum. Similarly, discourses on translation andtranslation history cannot be detached from the specific contexts of translationproduction and use. |