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Conceptual hybridization can occur either through internal evolution, when new historical circumstances invest an existing concept with new semantics, giving rise to a commixture in it of both old and new meanings. It can also occur when a concept is used to translate a foreign idea, creating a composite of native and imported semantics. The new semantics a concept acquires when used to translate foreign ideas are usually more radically heterogeneous to the target culture than those it can engender through internal evolution. Conceptual hybridization effected by translation could thus be revolutionary, as was the case with the Chinese concept geming when used to translate the modern Western concept “revolution.” However, as is generally the case with conceptual change, the old semantics of geming did not immediately get displaced by the new. More often that not, old semantics linger on, because old institutions and old worldviews continue to hold sway over a people and their language for a period of time, till the old ways of thinking and historical circumstances have disappeared. In the case of geming, an old worldview which prevented an immediate takeover of the concept’s old semantics by the new was the traditional Chinese cyclical time in which geming was embedded and from which the concept derived its meaning in pre-modern China. The classical Chinese term geming was used by the Japanese and then readopted by the Chinese to translate the modern western concept “revolution”. The modern concept was shunned by the Chinese until after 1898. Scholars have so far focused on the contents of traditional Chinese values to explain this initial cold reception. I, by contrast, argue that the cold reception was rooted in the conflicts between the old cyclical and new linear temporalities framing respectively classical and modern gemings, causing the shared sets of contents in the two gemings to be inflected differently by two temporal forms. Before the Chinese could embrace the modern western concept “revolution,” they needed to have first developed the modern western linear time consciousness. My paper examines how the Chinese population’s change of heart toward the modern concept of “revolution” was intertwined with the Chinese assimilation of modern western linear time. I examine how China’s embrace of the modern concept of “revolution” was made possible by its adoption of linear temporality, evident from how the country’s new positive stance toward modern geming roughly coincided with its newborn enthusiasm for progress. Keywords: Revolution and Time, Translation, Geming, Cultural Revolution, Hybridization of Ideas

Este documento establece un diálogo crítico entre tres tipos de actividades transnacionales: la traducción, los Juegos Olímpicos y las relaciones internacionales. Las tres actividades involucran amicitia interestatal, donde el traduttore/traditore no se puede distinguir claramente, y donde la amistad/enemistad no se pueden separar fácilmente. El ensayo también busca arrojar nueva luz sobre las relaciones internacionales a través de los Estudios de Traducción, y demostrar cómo la política internacional se puede examinar como la "política de traducción" en acción.

This paper uses Martin Luther and Mao Zedong's translation strategies to philosophize anew the dialectic between the national and the global in the history of revolutions. Luther and Mao each instigated a "revolution" by translating a universal faith into a vernacular; the end product in each case was the globalization of his vernacularized faith and the export of his local revolution all over the world. By vernacularizing a universal faith, Luther and Mao respectively inaugurated a new national idiom, a new national identity and, in the case of Mao, founded a new nation. The far more intriguing phenomenon which I identify – and on which I seek to make my most original contributions is: Protestantism and Maoism developed global reach not despite, but because of, their insistence on a local translation-articulation of a universalist ideology. My paper attends to both the similarities and differences between Luther and Mao.

This essay strikes new paths for investigating the politics of translation and the (non-) universality of the concept of “human rights” by engaging them in a critical dialogue. Part I of my essay argues that a truly universal concept would have available linguistic equivalents in all languages. On this basis, I develop translation into a tool for disproving the claim that the concept human rights is universal. An inaccurate claim to universality could be made to look valid, however, if one culture dominates over others, and manages to impose its own concepts and exclude competitors. Part II explores how human rights, initially a modern Western concept, became more and more universalized as a result of the global reach of Western political and economic power. I attempt to shed new light on the subject by investigating the role of translation in bringing about the global hegemony of Western legal and political languages and concepts. Since translation always involves a choice of foregrounding one of the two languages and cultures involved, the translator is a power broker who can promote one voice at the expense of the other. My examples for conducting this investigation are the key contributions made by China and the West to the drafting of the UDHR: with ren and rights representing respectively the West and China’s proposed solutions to crimes against humanity in the immediate aftermath of World War II. While the concept rights became increasingly assimilated into the Chinese language along with her repeated defeats by colonial powers (and was already firmly established in the Chinese vocabulary by the time of the drafting of the UDHR), ren by contrast has never been included by any Western language and culture.

Drawing from Bakhtin and Habermas, I will show how the different voices in Gordimer's novel seem to be enacting a democratic public sphere in which no voice is granted authority over others - a public sphere which carries the promise of countering the social and political hierarchies established by the racist South African regime. The promise, however, turns out to be an illusion. As I will demonstrate, the possibility of an Enlightenment bourgeois public sphere which the novel seems to be gesturing at is being irreparably undermined by racism. In a country where the Enlightenment aspiration to universalism and equality before the law are glaringly contravened by racism, Rosa Burger is painfully aware of her inability to fully access the predicament of the blacks. As such, Burger's daughter remains only Burger's daughter, and the children of Soweto the children of Soweto; at no point in the novel do they truly intermingle. Despite the fact that both are fighting racism - and the novel is devoted to the "coming-of-age" of both kinds of children - Rosa Burger remains only the daughter of a Bürger at the end of the novel, not the daughter of South Africa, much less to say the daughter of Black South Africa. She has finally "come into her own," but the "self" she manages to realize is at best that of a disillusioned bourgeois individual (that of a disillusioned Bürger, so to speak) - a "self" that recalls Hegel's "beautiful soul." To appropriate György Lukács's language, Bürger's Daughter could be described as "modern bourgeois literature bear[ing] witness against bourgeois society". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptual hybridization can occur either through internal evolution, when new historical circumstances invest an existing concept with new semantics, giving rise to a commixture in it of both old and new meanings. It can also occur when a concept is used to translate a foreign idea, creating a composite of native and imported semantics. The new semantics a concept acquires when used to translate foreign ideas are usually more radically heterogeneous to the target culture than those it can engender through internal evolution. Conceptual hybridization effected by translation could thus be revolutionary, as was the case with the Chinese concept geming when used to translate the modern Western concept 'revolution'. However, as is generally the case with conceptual change, the old semantics of geming did not immediately get displaced by the new. More often that not, old semantics linger on, because old institutions and old worldviews continue to hold sway over a people and their language for a period of time, till the old ways of thinking and historical circumstances have disappeared. In the case of geming, an old worldview which prevented an immediate takeover of the concept's old semantics by the new was the traditional Chinese cyclical time in which geming was embedded and from which the concept derived its meaning in pre-modern China. The classical Chinese term geming was used by the Japanese and then readopted by the Chinese to translate the modern western concept 'revolution'. The modern concept was shunned by the Chinese until after 1898. Scholars have so far focused on the contents of traditional Chinese values to explain this initial cold reception. I, by contrast, argue that the cold reception was rooted in the conflicts between the old cyclical and new linear temporalities framing respectively classical and modern gemings, causing the shared sets of contents in the two gemings to be inflected differently by two temporal forms. Before the Chinese could embrace the modern western concept 'revolution', they needed to have first developed the modern western linear time consciousness. My paper examines how the Chinese population's change of heart toward the modern concept of 'revolution' was intertwined with the Chinese assimilation of modern western linear time. I examine how China's embrace of the modern concept of 'revolution' was made possible by its adoption of linear temporality, evident from how the country's new positive stance toward modern geming roughly coincided with its newborn enthusiasm for progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from Bakhtin and Habermas, I will show how the different voices in Gordimer's novel seem to be enacting a democratic public sphere in which no voice is granted authority over others - a public sphere which carries the promise of countering the social and political hierarchies established by the racist South African regime. The promise, however, turns out to be an illusion. As I will demonstrate, the possibility of an Enlightenment bourgeois public sphere which the novel seems to be gesturing at is being irreparably undermined by racism. In a country where the Enlightenment aspiration to universalism and equality before the law are glaringly contravened by racism, Rosa Burger is painfully aware of her inability to fully access the predicament of the blacks. As such, Burger's daughter remains only Burger's daughter, and the children of Soweto the children of Soweto; at no point in the novel do they truly intermingle. Despite the fact that both are fighting racism - and the novel is devoted to the "coming-of-age" of both kinds of children - Rosa Burger remains only the daughter of a Bürger at the end of the novel, not the daughter of South Africa, much less to say the daughter of Black South Africa. She has finally "come into her own," but the "self" she manages to realize is at best that of a disillusioned bourgeois individual (that of a disillusioned Bürger, so to speak) - a "self" that recalls Hegel's "beautiful soul." To appropriate György Lukács's language, Bürger's Daughter could be described as "modern bourgeois literature bear[ing] witness against bourgeois society". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]