The historical study of translation did not become a prominent research topic un til the turn of the twenty-first century. It was Lefevere (1993) who first identified a certain inadequacy in this area of research and held that this could, in part at least, be responsible for the discipline’s stunted growth. Clearly there was as little interest at this time, in the history of the development of Translation Studies, as there had been in focused scholarly inquiry regarding the historical translation traditions of specific individual countries (Hung and Wakabayashi 2005a). That this was indeed considered to be the case is confirmed by Snell-Hornby (2006) in her critical evaluation of the various turns in Translation Studies since the 1960's. Likewise, the realization of this can also be seen in the work of Delisle and Woodsworth (1995) whose publication documents the roles of notable interpreters in the histories of European civilizations. Above all, this defining work of the mid 1990s drew the attention of the research community to the seminal article of Bowen et al. (1995) in which interpreters’ plausible roles in the making of history was ex amined across pre-modern and modern periods in various language cultures. In many ways, my research interests in the history of interpreting and inter preters’ roles in the writing of diplomatic histories were inspired, if not shaped, by these pioneers. However, working in the ancient Chinese tradition has given me the distinct opportunity of engaging with a specialized kind of data. This research monograph has two focuses: first, interpreters or interpreting events documented in standard archives in early imperial China; and second, in terpreters’ roles in the making of written archival records about foreign countries and peoples in this time frame. The first focus (Chapters 1 to 4 and 9 to 10) is representative of the initial years I spent on the historical research of interpreting in ancient China during which I was more concerned about locating traces of interpreters and their activities in the archives. Interpreters were never the main players in diplomatic exchanges in China, and their imprints in archival records were quite minimal. Yet, for the sake of research as much as for my own personal curiosity, I have considered interpret ers to be too important to be made textually obsolete in historiography in these cross-linguistic and cross-cultural exchanges. The second focus (Chapters 5 to 8) demonstrates my further thoughts re garding the archived traces of interpreters. Of particular interest to me have been interpreters’ roles in the making of archival records documenting China’s interlin gual and intercultural exchanges. More specifically, I would like to present some thoughts over the possible relationship between interpreters and the writing of archives in the documentation of such exchanges. These two perspectives are rarely documented at length in the literature of either Translation or History Studies. Intended as a contribution to these missing pieces of knowledge in both disciplines, this book attempts to uncover the subtle presence of interpreters in China’s archived diplomatic encounters, and forge the probable link between interpreters and the writing of diplomatic histories in China in antiquity. Based on a detailed examination of selective archival records of China, spanning almost a thousand years from the first through the ninth centuries, this monograph provides snapshots of translation and interpreting activities between imperial China and its neighbors in Asia at large. It displays a range of archived information about interpreters’ identities, mediating and non-mediating tasks, status, accomplishments, and relations with their patrons and other people they worked with in early imperial China. It also provides a perspective in which translators and interpreters might have made an impact on how certain diplomatic events were recorded in history, hence revealing the unspoken link, so often neglected, between translators or interpreters and the subsequent recording of history.
