Translation of medical texts from Dutch to Japanese: The first steps
Abstract
As is well known, the Dutch were the only Westerners who were permitted to trade with Japan between 1639 and 1854. However, the Dutch imported not only goods, but also books, including many that dealt with scientific subjects. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, about a thousand books dealing with different scientific subjects were translated from Dutch to Japanese. This article goes back to the first episodes in this story and uses primary sources to try and answer a number of research questions: what were the source and target language of the first translations and how did the translators go about their work? Furthermore, the article places this story within a wider research context in order to assess whether the examples presented change our idea of what translation is and how this story relates to the work on polysystems by Itamar Even-Zohar. To sum up, this article offers an interesting case study in the first phase of translating between two languages that previously not had any contact.
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