Çeviride Modernleşme Girişimleri: Osmanlı Bab-ı Ali ve Çin Jiangnan Arsenal Tercüme Bürosu Örneği

Abstract

Today, the word modern is interpreted as the West, and modernization as the approach of other countries to Western models. Although Ottoman Turkey and China ignored the West for a long time, they did not fail to take it as an example in their modernization periods. In the modernization attempts of these two countries, the idea of benefiting from the West only in science and technology lies, while preserving their traditionalist structures. Today, these two countries, united in the discourse of the "sick man of the east", actually appear as two similar cultures that intersect in the modernization processes in the history of translation. These countries, which accepted translation for similar reasons in similar historical processes, took the West as a role model in translation with their similar prejudices and perspectives that changed over time. The purpose of this study is beyond a single sentence that is seen as the destinies of Turkey and China; is to introduce the common reasons that pushed the two countries to translation and the modernization processes in translation with the examples of Bab-ı Ali Translation Room in the Ottoman Empire and Jiangnan Arsenal Translation Office in China. In accordance with this purpose, in this article, using the China Academic Journals (CNKI) database, thesis related to the subject and the information obtained from open sources, the perspectives of these countries against the West and their translation reasons were examined through the examples of the first official translation institutions of the two countries. In this direction, it was concluded that both countries started to lose power in the aforementioned times and accepted the West for similar reasons in modernization in translation. In addition, it was seen that these countries had similar perspectives towards the West in history, and their cultures intersected in the history of translation, apart from today's "sick man" discourse.