Yan Fu's Unfaithful Translation of Thomas Huxley's 'Evolution and Ethics'

Abstract

This paper analyses Yan Fu’s translation of the title and the key terms in Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and shows that his unfaithfulness was mainly due to his personal intention to inspire the Chinese people to fight against foreign enemies and the feudal system in late nineteenth-century China. In his famous The Heavenly Theory of Evolution, the translation of Evolution and Ethics, Yan Fu added the traditional Chinese value of ‘heaven’ by translating ‘evolution’ as ‘heavenly evolution’ in order to make Darwin’s theory more acceptable and easier to understand by target readers. When he translated terms such as ‘competition’ and ‘natural selection’, Yan Fu borrowed the slogan of the Westernizing reform to explain the relationship linking evolution, competition and selection. Yan Fu wanted to arouse people’s attention to the theory of evolution and hoped they would use evolutionary thought as a theoretical weapon to save themselves and the country from a national crisis. His unfaithful translation appealed to the scholars to make them spread the theory through their social influence.