Like the natural sciences, the humanities and literary sciences call on a specialized vocabulary. The terms and concepts that fill this lexicon each have a specific origin: mimesis can easily be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, sublimity to Longinus, and so on. The vocabulary of literary studies is therefore the result of a long series of experiences, in other words, examples. When our reading takes us away from familiar languages and civilizations, we should expect that our previous experiences won't fit the landscape, and that new terms will emerge from new encounters.
How does a translated text become part of a country's literary history? Does it meet a felt need in the destination country? A not inconsiderable part of the translator's art consists in creating a reception context for the work from elsewhere; or in finding the pre-existing desire that the translated work will fulfill (think of the French careers of Poe or Whitman).
It was in attempting to describe the strategies employed by Chinese translators, from the introduction of Buddhism to that of Baudelaire, or roughly from 150 to 1924 CE, that I was led to propose the term "sponsortext" for the model that naturalizes the text to be translated, that gives it a place in the world by suggesting the form it will take in its new language and even by gathering its potential audience. In Chinese literary history, it's often the same text that performs these functions: the Zhuangzi anthology of Taoist philosophies (originally composed around 300 CE). Why has this work so often served as an intermediary? Does this circumstance tell us something about translation activity throughout the history of dynastic China?
Chinese translation has its own originality. It responds to conditions foreign to the career of translation in the Middle East or Europe. Antoine Berman's theses on the ethics of translation, for example, should be modified.
