Cross-culture, Translation and Indigenization of Social Sciences

Cultural differences have brought translational activities among them. Academic communication in cross-culture which had hoped to achieve an exact understanding of the source texts through language conversion, could not be faithfully reproduced because of the characteristics of the mother tongue. Whether it is the efforts of Western missionaries such as Matteo Ricci to translate Confucian classics into the Western world, or Chinese intellectuals such as Yan Fu trying to translate a series of Western books and concepts to the Chinese world, the cultural strategies and self-correction in their translations have matched their localization of knowledge. The hypothetical equivalences of translation should have the semantic consistency in cross-culture. This is achieved since the natural sciences establish a common symbol system in their academic communities. However, in the field of humanities and social sciences, because translation activities have always faced creative rebellion, the original positions, internal frameworks and basic assumptions in the cultural concepts or texts of the source language have undergone some degree of change in translation.