Yan Fu

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Yan Fu

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Yan.

Yan Fu (Traditional Chinese: 嚴復; Simplified Chinese: 严复; pinyin: Yán Fù; courtesy name: Traditional Chinese: 幾道; Simplified Chinese: 几道; pinyin: Jī Dào) (January 8, 1854 - October 27, 1921) was a Chinese scholar and translator, most famous for introducing Western thoughts, including Darwin's ideas of "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest", into China during the late 19th century.

He studied in the Fujian Arsenal Academy (福州船政學堂) in Fuzhou, Fujian Province. From 1877-1879, he studied in the Navy Academy in Greenwich, England. Upon his return to China, he was unable to pass the Imperial Civil Service Examination, while teaching at the Fujian Arsenal Academy and then Beiyang Naval Officers' School (北洋水師學堂) at Tianjin.

It was not until after the Chinese defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War that Yan Fu became famous for his works of the time period. He is well-known for his translations including Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Herbert Spencer's Study of Sociology. Yan critiqued the ideas of Darwin and others, offering his own interpretation of them.

The ideas of "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" were introduced to Chinese readers through Huxley's work. The former idea was famously rendered as tianze (天擇) into Chinese by him.

He became a respected scholar for his translations, and became politically active. He was involved in the Gong Zhe Shangshu movement in 1895. In 1912, he became the first principal of the National Peking University (now Peking University).

[edit] As translation theorist

Yan stated in his preface to his translation of Evolution and Ethics (天演論) that "there are three difficulties in translation: faithfulness, understandability and elegance" (譯事三難：信達雅). He did not set that three difficulties as a general standard for translation, and did not say that those three were independent of each other. However, since the publication of that work, "faithfulness, understandability and elegance" has been attributed to Yan Fu as a standard for any good translation, become a cliche in the Chinese academic circle, and raised numerous debates and theses. Some scholars argue that the dictum came from Alexander Fraser Tytler.

[edit] References

Benjamin I. Schwartz (1964). In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
(Chinese) Shen Suru 沈蘇儒 (1998). Lun Xin Da Ya: Yan Fu Fanyi Lilun Yanjiu (論信達雅：嚴復翻譯理論硏究 "On faithfulness, understandability and elegance: a study of Yan Fu's translation theory"). Beijing: Commercial Press.