Translation as an activity is viewed in many ways. On the one hand, it is often seen as the work of highly trained specialists, who with painstaking diligence try to “reproduce” the meaning of a text from one linguistic framework to another. On the other hand, the famous Italian dictum “traduttore, tradittore” (‘to translate is to betray‘) is never far from the mind of readers, and certainly philosophical readers in particular. In this paper, I want to revisit the activity of translation as a way of understanding philosophical activity in general. The basic claim would be that all philosophical activity can be understood as “translation.” I will arrive at this general claim through three steps. First, a consideration of “everyday” acts of translation which often go unnoticed or are not made explicit in our daily lives provides a background for a reconsideration of the centrality of translation. Second, we will turn to Edmund Husserl’s surprising reflections on “travel” and his distinction between surrounding-world (Umwelt), foreign-world (Fremdwelt) and home-world (Heimwelt) as a way of bringing out structural components of our everyday experience. In the third part, I want to suggest that Husserl’s reflections allow us to deconstruct certain notions of translation (eg. that it is merely unidirectional from “original” to “target”; or that it is best understood as mathematical or “algorithmic”). The emphasis should be placed rather more on translation as a “reconstruction,” or even better, a “renewal” of meaning. In my conclusion, I will stress that viewing translation (and philosophy in general) as a site of the active renewal of meaning does not mean that there are no boundaries at work, or that we cannot discuss “better or worse” translations. But these “necessary” boundaries should be viewed as provisional and themselves always open to “translation.”

Online
No registration is required.
Meeting ID: 993 1918 6410
Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99319186410

Face-to-face
Register by 15 March 2024
Link: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13685004

此次活动邀请到众多重要嘉宾参与，包括中大文学院院长唐小兵教授、副院长（公关及推广）黄念欣教授、艺术系系主任Frank Vigneron教授、研究院艺术学部主任尹翠琪教授以及香港中文大学文物馆馆长姚进庄教授。 现场气氛热烈，吸引了来自不同领域的观众前来参加，包括校友、学生、来自香港艺术界的友好以及广大的艺术爱好者。 他们共聚一堂，度过了一个愉快而充满热情交流的时光。

刘凤霞博士是香港土生土长的「文艺女孩」，自小对艺术充满热情，师承国学大师饶宗颐教授。 刘博士细述在中大艺术系的学习点滴，感怀所遇的良师益友，不少当年的同侪更是这次讲座的座上客，足见众人情谊深厚。 刘博士亦分享了她逾37年的艺术策划和推广工作心得，特别以「油街实现」(Oi!) 计划为傲，通过日常活动与市民对话，鼓励大众共同参与及创作艺术，使艺术融入 生活。 现场观众亦积极发问，与刘博士展开真情对话。 刘博士提到面对挑战时应保持冷静，积极处理问题并设法解决困难。 深受同事爱戴的刘博士也时常为同事解困，共同拆解疑难。

文学院由衷感谢刘凤霞博士为参加者带来宝贵而精彩的一课！ 我们祝愿刘博士未来一切顺利，享受退休生活之余，能继续拓展新领域。 感谢所有支持者见证我们的60周年重要时刻，文学院将持续贡献人文教育和艺术发展，致力以多元、创新和活跃的姿态面向全球。

Translation, like love, is a “many-splendoured thing”, and like any aspect of language in context, it is approached and illuminated from different vantage points, including not only those located within different academic disciplines but also ones situated within other institutions where translation plays a major role, centrally the instituion of translation as a profession. Our understanding of translation benefits from this “group picture” of it, as do our activities relating to translation; but there is always the danger of the kind of fragmentation that comes with increasing specialization (cf. Bohm, 1979).
In principle, the one discipline that is focussed on language as its object of scientific study, linguistics, ought to provide an integrated picture of translation to counteract the tendency towards fragmentation. However, in general, it doesn’t — it has failed to live up to this task: in the last 60 years or so, linguistics has tended to diversify into traditions with a fairly narrow focus on certain research questions, and many theories do not actually engage with translation even though it must be central on the agenda of any linguistic theory, as must multilinguality more generally.
In contrast, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) provides a holistic theory of language in context as a semiotic system within an ordered typology of systems operating in different phenomenal realms (semiotic [also conceptualized as cognitive] > social > biological > physical; cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2006; Matthiessen & Teruya, 2024) — one that resonates with holistic theories of complex adaptive systems more generally; cf. Capra & Luisi, 2014), and this theory is designed to be appliable to a wide range of problems that arise in human life and to support the development of comprehensive descriptions of particular languages such as Chinese and English in their contexts of culture. Scholars developing SFL have engaged with translation since its origins in the 1960s, including the pre-SFL work by its main originator, M.A.K. Halliday (e.g. 1956); and in first decades of the 21st century, SFL-informed publications engaging with translation have grown considerably in number, dealing with a growing number of pairs of languages (e.g. Steiner & Yallop, 2001; Hansen-Schirra et al., 2012; Wang & Ma, 2021; Kim et al., 2021; Kunz et al., 2021; Wang et al., in press).
In this talk, I will identify key characteristics of SFL that have been central in the illumination of translation as a many-splendoured phenomenon — or that can be in future as the demands on, and conditions for, translation keep changing, as in the current dramatic change in capability of “machine translation”. They include: the systemic organization of languages as meaning-making resources in context, the spectrum of metafunctional modes of meaning, the continuum between the multilingual meaning potential and instantial acts of translation, the phenomenal orders of translation. Translation is interpreted as the recreation of meaning in context through choice (e.g. Halliday, 2010; Matthiessen, 2014) in its various environments (Matthiessen, 2001).
In short, just as the stage is in the centre in theatre in the round, translation is in the centre in stranslation in the round informed by SFL: thanks to its multidimensional relational “architecture” of language in context, it enables us to move along different dimensions, viewing translation from complementary angles. I will suggest that we can appreciate the richness of the phenomenon of translation and the need for a framework like SFL, touching on special cases of translation, like the translation of “nonsense” and interlinear glossing. And I will show how the study of translation can productively be related to the investigation of other multilingual phenomena (like code mixing and switching; “translanguaging”; cf. Matthiessen et al., 2008) and also metalingual phenomena (like revision, editing, summarization). Using SFL’s holistic account, I will refer to different “turns” in translation studies (e.g. Snell-Hornby, 2006, 2010; Martínez González, 2015), suggesting how they complement one another.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of our MA in Philosophy Programme, a series of philosophy talks will be held from February to June 2024. The 2nd talk will be given by Prof. Lau Kwok-ying, Emeritus Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUHK.

If you are interested to join, please register the 2nd talk at: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13680095 by 2 April 2024 (Tuesday).
If you have registered previously, please do not re-submit a new registration. We will send confirmation email to you around mid-March 2024.
(Limited seats. Registration will be handled on a first come, first served basis)

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of our MA in Philosophy Programme, a series of book sharing event titled “MA 20周年慶：齊來讀哲學” will be held from March to October 2024. The 1st book reading session will be led by Dr. Lau Po-hei, Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, CUHK. The purpose of the event is to promote reading of philosophy books and the MA programme to the general public. Dr. Lau will introduce and share the book for 45 minutes, 3 students/alumni in the reading group will share the book for 15 minutes each, the rest of 30 minutes will be Q&A for the participants/general public.

If you are interested to join, please register the event at: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13683012.
(Limited seats. Registration will be handled on a first come, first served basis)

面对生态的破坏、科技的发展和各种书写关注点的转变，「人的文学」已不足以阐释现当代华文文学中所反映出的人和世界的关系。 我以王安忆的小说《考工记》和上海古宅书隐楼为例，提出「物的文学」这一概念，来探讨「物」通过「工」的显隐之变。

The Research Centre for Chinese Philosophy and Culture (RCCPC) will organize an international workshop on Dai Zhen’s philosophy on March 15–16 (Friday to Saturday), 2024. This workshop aims to bring together experts and scholars to exchange their latest research on Dai Zhen’s philosophy, engage in mutual discussions, and cultivate new knowledge through discussion of previous scholarship.

Mainland China
Prof. LI Changran 李暢然教授 (Editorial and Research Center of Confucian Canon, Peking University)
Prof. LIU Liangjian 劉梁劍教授 (East China Normal University)
Prof. WU Genyou 吳根友教授 (Wuhan University)

U.S.
Prof. HU Minghui 胡明輝教授 (The University of California, Santa Cruz)
Prof. NG On-cho 伍安祖教授 (The Pennsylvania State University)

Hong Kong
Prof. CHANG So-an 張壽安教授 (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Prof. CHENG Chung-yi 鄭宗義教授 (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)Prof. Justin TIWALD (The University of Hong Kong)
Prof. CHENG Kat-hung Dennis 鄭吉雄教授 (The Education University of Hong Kong)
Dr. CHONG Yun-chak 莊潤澤博士 (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Prof. Chris FRASER (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Prof. HUANG Yong 黃勇教授 (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Prof. YAO Zhihua 姚治華教授 (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Prof. ZHENG Zemian 鄭澤綿教授 (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

The Buddhist critique of the self raises a host of theoretical and practical difficulties within the philosophical fields of ethics and action theory. Vasubandhu’s essay on the negation of the self (Ātmavādapratiṣedha), constituting the ninth chapter of his Treasury of Metaphysics (Abhidharmakośabhāṣya), acknowledges some of these issues and tries to address them from a Buddhist point of view. One crucial difficulty in this regard, which is of significance both to followers of the Buddhist path who aim for awakening and to ordinary people who seek worldly happiness, is the issue of self-interested concern for the future; that is, the agent’s motivations to undertake actions for his or her future wellbeing. The question is how such an attitude can be justified and explained, if no permanent self exists. In the present talk, I will present Vasubandhu’s answer to this problem. I will begin by introducing Vasubandhu’s treatment of the broader issue of moral agency in the absence of an enduring self and what I see as his understanding of the agent on the two level of truths. The talk will then present the problem of Self-Interested Concern for the Future within this framework and Vasubandhu’s way of accounting for this ordinary motivation. I will argue that it rests on the notion that psychological identification with a persisting self is a necessary condition for being moral rather than a hindrance for ethics. The talk will conclude by showing the relevance of this solution to the broader field of Buddhist ethics.

Online
No registration is required.
Meeting ID: 967 8536 3542
Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/96785363542

Face-to-face
Register by 10 March 2024
Link: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13683685

Date: Friday, 15 March 2024
Time: 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm
Mode: In-person
Venue: Room 213, Humanities Building, New Asia College, CUHK

A light lunch will be served at 12:45 pm. First come, first served.
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This talk reflects on my role as an applied anthropologist, ethnographer, and digital storyteller, with the Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign (LASVC) between 2013 and 2020. The campaign was mobilized by African American, Caribbean, Mexican, Central American, and Latin American street vendor communities whose political entanglements overturned a century-long anti-vending ordinance criminalizing their livelihoods. They persist in creating moments and movements that unmasked power imbalances, sought recognition, and forged solidarities by embracing strategies, cultures, and politics of each other's experiences.

Our research produced augmented fotonovelas, a digital humanities platform for the campaign. This digital and print popular media project utilizes digital humanities and ethnographic methods in combination with augmented reality to  make  the fotonovela print come to life using a cell phone application. These methods put ethnography "to use" (Van Willigen), incorporating participant observation of street vendors who invited me into their homes, and work sites, along with audio-visual recorded interviews and conversations. Augmented fotonovelas have a liberatory potential when aggrieved communities are directly involved in their production, and the medium is designed for them to speak against indignities they experience and visually and sonically express new policy visions.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of our MA in Philosophy Programme, a series of philosophy talks will be held from February to June 2024. The 2nd talk will be given by Prof. Lau Kwok-ying, Emeritus Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUHK. Details of the 2nd talk

If you are interested to join, please register the 2nd talk at: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13680095 by 2 April 2024 (Tuesday).
If you have registered previously, please do not re-submit a new registration. We will send confirmation email to you around mid-March 2024.
(Limited seats. Registration will be handled on a first come, first served basis)