Mingled Identities and Lives in Translation: China as a Calling

The engagement of scholars and social scientists with cultures not their own is often said today to be a colonial or appropriative action. Such charges are countered here not defensively but by description of the hybridity of intercultural dialogues, of which translation is one case. Jesuit translation in Ming-dynasty China gives the example. Translation is often thought of as a channel – a way of moving content from one language to another. It is more productive, in my view, to treat it as a receptacle, a vessel in which unexpected combinations occur and give rise to new substances. Thus the missionary goal becomes a mere precursor to an actual production of new texts and new identities.