Hands from behind:: an ideological probe into Taiwanese religious translation

• Chung-ling Shih ^[1]
  1. [1] National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology

     National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology

     Taiwán

     
• Localización: The Translator: studies in intercultural communication, ISSN 1355-6509, Vol. 23, Nº. 3, 2017, págs. 324-347
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article investigates how differentiated (e.g. private publishers) and undifferentiated patrons (e.g. the government) exercise ideological control over the selection and the translation of Taoist poetic divination lots and Buddhist books in Taiwan. The article discusses a close correlation among patrons, poetics, ideology and translation within the framework of Lefeveré’s theory of patronage and poetics. Synchronic and diachronic analyses were carried out and the findings showed that undifferentiated patrons often treated religious translation as the source of epistemological input, disciplinary studies and culture education, but differentiated patrons used it as a tool of spiritual healing. Furthermore, a time-based probe found that pre-2000 patrons tended to publish and commission the religious translations that have disciplinary and theoretical values, and post-2000 patrons, those that carried out the practical and utilitarian functions for the public’s use. Despite its small sample size, this study suggests that Taoist and Buddhist religious translations are inevitably the ideological products that are created within a complex sociocultural network that is made up of the patron’s top-down control and the target audience’s bottom-up engagements.