ABSTRACT
There have been waves of translation throughout Chinese history, sometimes predominantly into Chinese, and occasionally predominantly out of Chinese into other languages. The transfer of Buddhism over the Himalayas from AD 2 was dependent on translation, and the movement brought a new richness to the Chinese language (Hung 2005: 57). The period of Jesuit mission in China in the seventeenth century, at the beginning of the Qing dynasty, brought another substantial impetus to the activity of translation, both into Chinese from Latin, and out of Chinese (Spence 1990: 66, 132). A third major wave was that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when China became acutely aware of the need for modern Western technology and science (Spence 1990: 239). The adoption of Soviet-style writing for revolutionary purposes during the fi rst half of the twentieth century might be regarded as the fourth. Now, in the twenty-fi rst century, while on the one hand China is integrating into global economy and culture, on the other hand the western world has woken up to China, and has realised that the biggest nation on earth does not necessarily write in English.
