Conclusion

This chapter serves as a conclusion to the monograph. It presents a summary of each chapter of the book, and states its significance to the field of translation studies. It shows this book's identification of Lin as a largely unacknowledged precursor of the politics of recognition through his grasp of the possibility of translating something unfamiliar, foreign and different. More importantly, it emphasises Lin's legacy of translation and recognition: Translation is not a pure transmission of the original, but rather an interpretative act that acknowledges and, at the same time, refuses to prioritise the perspective of target-language readers located in the contingent here and now. In this way, the translation of (ancient) Chinese culture can be made alive and relevant to the English-speaking world and simultaneously retain its distinctiveness This chapter highlights Lin's overlooked role as a forerunner of a politics of recognition whose translation theory prefigures in many ways the emerging trends of Western translation practices after the Second World War.