Rethinking the history of ”Cession”: a case study on the translation of ”Unequal Treaties”

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the 19th and early 20th centuries, China had signed a series of unequal treaties with the Western powers due to military defeats. Taking a translational perspective, this paper compares the articles on cessions in the treaties and their Chinese translations in synchronic and diachronic manners in order to examine how the demands for cessions were raised by the foreign powers and conveyed to China during 1842–1911. This study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the research approach and systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as the analytical tool in examining the translational shifts. The linguistic discrepancy in translation can be regarded as an ideological reconstruction, which influences the practice of power in the target system. To examine such discrepancies, comparative studies are conducted at lexico-grammatical and semantic levels. The data for analysis are selected from the Sino-British treaties signed at different historical stages. As the translation practice was deeply influenced by the historical situations, the socio-historical contexts that conditioned the conclusion of these treaties are also taken into consideration in interpreting the translation shifts.