Chinese Translation Workshop

COURSE DETAILS

5 Week  Online Course beginning on July 7th

Class meets on Tuesdays from 1:30 – 3pm EST

Welcome to our workshop! Nothing helps improve the quality of a translation better than critique and suggestions from other translators. Giving and receiving critique is also the best way to improve your skills. In this workshop each participant will have opportunities to bring in their work for others to read and respond to. As the coordinator I will give detailed feedback on everyone’s work and will also present “tools of the trade”—historical and linguistic references, discussions of translation practice and theory, etc.—that make it easier to do good translations. I look forward to working with everyone!

The English-speaking Chinese medicine community desperately needs more good translators. More than 10,000 medical texts were written before 1911, and who knows how many since then. Translating just the core texts would require a translation project the size of Kumārajīva’s, which the imperial government set up to translate Buddhism into Chinese during the 5th century. I don’t think we’re going to get that kind of support, but we can at least support ourselves in this vital and engaging work!

Stephen Boyanton received his PhD in East Asian History from Columbia University, focusing on the medical history of China. He earned his MS in Chinese medicine from Pacific College of Health and Science (formerly Pacific College of Oriental Medicine) and has studied and followed physicians at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and Chengdu University of Chinese Medicine. He has taught Chinese language, medicine, history, and philosophy for over a decade. His PhD dissertation focused on developments in cold damage theory from 1000-1400, and his research and translations have been published in the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, the Journal of Chinese Medicine, the journal Ancient Exchanges, and as part of Brill’s Compilation of Chinese Medicine Periodicals Online, 1897-1952. An article of his will appear in the forthcoming anthology From Tang to Song: Transitions and Creations in China’s Middle Period.