Abstract:

According to Transknowletology proposed by Professor Yang Feng, in the translated text cultural messages may have been added by the translator and put in the place supposed to be solely occupied by translated knowledge, which hides the nature of knowledge transference of translation from view. This point of view exposes the fact that what is expected to be translated in the source text is knowledge, but the way the translator treats knowledge may be cultural reconstruction. This throws light on the difference between translated knowledge and reconstructed cultural messages. In this article, studies on cases of Figurism show how Jesuits reconstructed culture while translating knowledge to serve their purpose. They decomposed Chinese characters into separate parts and imagined their symbolic meanings, compared Chinese sages to Christian prophets, associated images of the hexagrams with biblical revelations, and rendered the texts of Chinese classics through paraphrase.

Key words: Transknowletology, culture reconstruction, the Yijing, Figurism