ACIAC Seminar: Ancient Chinese Primers: Translation & Dissemination

Traditional Chinese education depended a lot on the use of classical primers. In the last two hundred years or so, particularly with the various modern waves of Chinese diaspora, many of these educational materials became known to the outside world through translation. In this seminar, ACIAC’s visiting Professor Ren Xiaofei and her colleagues Professor Feng Ruizheng, Dr Liu Feng and Mr Zhang Jie will speak about a key research project that seeks to track the overseas trajectories of translation and dissemination of some of these texts used by Chinese pedagogues with children. The project is funded by a grant from the Chinese National Social Sciences Foundation, and in their seminar, they will talk about some of their findings pertaining to the travels across time and space of three texts, namely, The Thousand Character Classic (《千字文》), The Family Instructions of Zhu (《朱子家训》), and Ming Xian Ji (《明贤集》). Within the interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional research framework of translation studies, Chinese education studies, and modern communication studies, they seek to offer insights into some typical routes and features of such cross-cultural gestures of communication. The project is also important because it can shed light on how translators could further help when a part of country’s traditional culture is globalized, and how these traditional texts might contribute to today’s international Chinese language teaching and learning.