The article presents an overview of the issues discussed in Tomasz Ewertowski’s monograph Images of China in Polish and Serbian Travel Writings (1720–1949). It reconstructs the discourse that emerges from the journals as their authors report on their journeys to the Middle Kingdom. The article also analyses the conditioning of the presented attitudes in the context of individual experience. Using imagology-based tools, Ewertowski refers to the mental representations of reality recorded in the text in the form of stereotypically formed ethnotypes. Ewertowski creates a mosaic of the way travellers from the West imagined both Chinese cities and the characteristic features of Far Eastern culture, which is often marked by Eurocentrism and an evaluating attitude towards the Other.
In 2020, Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog published the Polish version of Chiny i Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia. Historia kontaktów literackich (China and Central and Eastern Europe. The History of Literary Contacts) by Chinese literary scholars: Ding Chao and Song Binghui. The book is part of the series Historia Kontaktów Literackich między Chinami a Zagranicą (The History of China’s Foreign Literary Contacts) which aims to become a comprehensive description of China’s cultural exchange with other countries. Volume 17 is devoted to China’s relationships with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. In this group, Poland occupies one of the central positions due to, among other, a high interest in Polish history among Chinese intellectual elite of the early twentieth century and among the reformers of Chinese literature in that period. The article discusses the sources of the popularity of Polish themes in the formative period of modern Chinese literature and the reception of Polish literature in China today. It also attempts to familiarise the readers with the themes studied by the researchers, the goals they set for themselves and the methods they used to achieve them, and presents the benefits of publishing the book in Polish.
The Translation of Chinese Proper Names: A Cognitive Approach The article focuses on the translation of non-literary Chinese proper names, a subject which to date has not enjoyed much research interest as a result of the common belief that proper names are untranslatable. The article discusses techniques used in the translation of Chinese anthroponyms, toponyms and brand names into Polish and English. The author refers to the strategies used in the process of transferring names to the target language and presents the consequences of applying given techniques from the cognitive perspective, which entails analysing the names in terms of their structure and meaning. Particular attention is paid to the connotations of the names, the impact they have on the speakers of a given language, as well as the mental images that can be derived from their structure. In the contrastive analysis of the names of tourist locations in Beijing and their Polish and English equivalents, the author applies the cognitive grammar approach as developed by Ronald W. Langacker. The image schemas of the names are used to present the distinct conceptualizations embodied in the names with the same references in different languages. One of the chapters describes how European names are adapted into Chinese. The study also provides an overview of the characteristics of the Chinese onomasticon, a factor which makes translation from Chinese to European languages particularly complicated. The observations made in the course of the analysis permit conclusions to be drawn on the linguistic worldview created by Polish, Chinese and English propria.
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