| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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satisfaction. Personal satisfaction might also have been present in academic and commercial translations, and hopes of material gain were also likely to be present in academic and personal translations. Translation “factories” could be commercial or political organizations.
The Chinese example is unusual in global terms only in regard to personal and political translations. This book is about formal translation, as one variety of political translation, and informal translation, as one variety of personal translation. Commercial and academic translations of modern Chinese literature into English in China, especially since the 1980s, have not differed significantly from literary translations in other countries and are referred to in later chapters only in passing for the purpose of comparison.16
Formal Translation
Part 1 examines one particular case of state sponsorship: the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, established in 1952 and still one of the largest publishers in China. The FLP was one of several large-scale institutions for the management, promotion, and control of cultural activities by the Chinese Communist Party. Its translation practice was highly organized, and its product correspondingly formal.
There are few studies in any language of the FLP. Biographies and autobiographies of Chinese and foreign members of staff tend to be reticent and unreliable.17 Academic studies are even scarcer; Anne-Marie Brady’s book on foreign experts in China stands alone as an invaluable resource.18 The FLP’s own archives are presumably incomplete as well as being inaccessible to outside researchers. In the absence of other documentation, part 1 of this book is primarily an attempt to set down for the record how the FLP functioned as a translation employer, promoter, and authorizer from the limited perspective of an employee who was on a foreign, short-term contract and who was a consumer of its publications over a longer period. Some readers may find the detail excessive, but I am prompted to include it by the fact that this period in contemporary Chinese history is already in the distant past.