George K W Mak (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge)
The Contributions of Mandarin Protestant Bible Translation to the Emergence of Modern Chinese National Language
My paper examines how Mandarin Protestant Bible translation in late Qing era helped foster the standardization of Mandarin as modern Chinese national language. While Elisabeth Kaske argued that the idea of a “national language” was coming to China only after the turn of the 20th century, since the mid-19th century, Mandarin Bible translators had indeed promoted the idea of tongxing Mandarin, i.e. Mandarin everywhere current regardless of social class, which could be viewed as a model of Mandarin developing into a national language. When translating the Bible, they adopted the standard form of Mandarin as their basis, blending it with words and usages of local forms of Mandarin, which helped smooth out differences between the varieties of Mandarin. Moreover, a number of Japanese kanji terms derived from Classical Chinese are found in the 19th century Mandarin Bible versions and were employed by the translators in ways close to the terms’ modern usages in Chinese. Given the wide circulation of Mandarin Bible versions in China since the 1870s, we should not overlook the contribution of the Mandarin Bible to the formation of modern Chinese lexicon.
