ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the history of terminology used to denote translation (broadly conceived) in premodern Japan. An investigation of the terms used to describe the translation process in Japan prior to the modern period reveals not only a variety of practices different from current understandings of what it is that translators do, but also the attitudes of translators towards the act of translation itself and the textual tradition concerned. Of particular importance in the Japanese case was the absence of an authoritative translation tradition, such as the translation of scripture, which would have rendered translation more visible and from which a unified body of translation terminology could have been drawn. Instead, premodern Japanese translation was conceptualized within discrete fields of textual practice, and the dominant paradigm within which translation practices were located was that of commentary. This explains why there were so many different terms for ‘translation’ in premodern Japan and why so many of them blur the line between translation and textual exegesis.
