Lei Tao is a lecturer from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University. He got his PhD degree in Comparative Literature at Fudan. He has published several academic papers in Chinese Culture, Fudan Journal, Journal of East China Normal University and other academic publications. He is also one of the translators of the Chinese version of Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement by Tsi-An Hsia. His research focuses on Chinese translation history.
No evidence has been found in existing literature that the word zhiyi (literal translation) has been used in ancient Chinese. It is also not common to see the combination of zhi and yi, which can be regarded as the abbreviation of “direct translation” — the understanding of “direct” always changes with the context. This kind of zhiyi is completely different from the translation term zhiyi we use nowadays. The modern Chinese word zhiyi (literal translation), opposite to yiyi (freetranslation), appeared no later than the beginning of the twentieth century. However, it was considered as an inadequate translation method then. Actually, zhiyi originated from Japanese. It was written in the form of Chinese character in Japanese, and could be found in many dictionaries from late Shogunate to early Meiji. Since Chinese and Japanese shared Chinese characters, zhiyi became a Chinese word easily by the way of “word loaning.” The “loaning” process was recorded in the notes left by Chinese students in Japan around the turn of the century, and the articles in Qingyi Newspaper and Xinmin Journal run by Liang Qichao in Japan.
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