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This ground-breaking volume on early modern inter-Asian translation examines how translation from plain Chinese was situated at the nexus between, on the one hand, the traditional standard of biliteracy characteristic of literary practices in the Sinographic sphere, and on the other, practices of translational multilingualism (competence in multiple spoken languages to produce a fully localized target text). Translations from plain Chinese are shown to carve out new ecologies of translations that not only enrich our understanding of early modern translation practices across the Sinographic sphere, but also demonstrate that the transregional uses of a non-alphabetic graphic technology call for different models of translation theory.

The standard origin story of Chosŏn fiction glossaries of Shuihuzhuan, Xixiangji, Sanguozhiyanyi, and Xiyouji goes that they emerged primarily because Chosŏn readers lacked linguistic proficiency in vernacular Chinese. Contextualizing fiction glossaries within the Chosŏn reception discourse of the four Chinese works and examining the patterns of explication undergirding fiction glossaries in comparison with those of a glossary of Zhuzi yulei, I instead assert that fiction glossaries were Chosŏn readers’ cultural response to the eloquence of plain Chinese in novelistic writing. Further, I explain that fiction glossaries are a textual space within which the creative, performative, and affective eloquence of Korean is contrasted with the limited articulacy of Literary Sinitic.