The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire

"In a narrow sense, this is a twin biography. It’s about two translators who are actors in this big drama of the encounter between the British and Chinese empires in the late 18th and early 19th century—from the 1790s through to the Opium Wars in the late 1830s. One of these two figures is George Staunton, who’s a child prodigy. He learns to speak Chinese when he’s very young and meets the emperor when he’s twelve years old. He must have been insufferable! He stays on in China and becomes an interpreter for the East India Company. Then we have this remarkable character, Li Zibiao, who’s part of the Catholic tradition in China. A lot of people will discover the existence of this because there’s a general assumption that China in that period is completely inward-looking, and largely closed to the world. The fact that Li Zibiao goes to Naples, becomes a Catholic priest, and learns Latin doesn’t help his career. But at this particular moment, and in this encounter, he plays a very important role. The slightly larger story Henrietta Harrison is telling is about the role of these two translators in mediating the encounter between these two powers that are trying to reach some kind of accommodation. It’s a wonderfully subtle book because when you look at the diplomatic history, the way in which this encounter is normally written about, it’s about clashes, about oppositions. It’s generally written in a binary way. What she’s trying to do is go beyond those oppositions and find, through these two people, the spaces where compromise and mutual understanding could be reached. Translation is one critical way in which this could happen. She has wonderful examples. How you translate the Chinese word yi makes a huge difference: whether you’re calling the British ‘foreigners’ or ‘barbarians.’ You could translate it with either word. If you use one, it has one set of consequences; and if you do the other, it has a different set of consequences. That whole part of the book where she dwells on the skills that these interpreters bring to bear is fascinating. In overall terms, the interpreters are not strong enough to be able to control the outcome, so, in the end, the two sides clash. But what the book implies—and she more or less says it—is that had they listened to their interpreters or taken them a bit more seriously, then the Opium Wars might not have happened in the way that they did. Also, one of the things that she digs out really impressively is the understanding that we now have of how badly this encounter went was created later on. It made me think of a more general point, which is that a lot of information we have about these landmark historical moments often come to us through understandings that we think are based on fact, but they aren’t at all. History is based on facts, but these facts are also social constructions. The Chinese nationalists in the early 20th century absolutely had an agenda—a perfectly understandable one, which was to pump up China and bash the West—and therefore, they ended up providing this account, which more or less erased the role of more consensual approaches. That’s how history gets written."