Pushing hands, the invisible hand, and the changing (pre-)faces of the first baihua Chinese translation of the wealth of nations

In Translation Studies (TS), theories about translation have traditionally been fl ooded with dichotomous categorizations: word-for-word versus sense-for-sense translation; faithful versus unfaithful translation; domestication versus foreignization. Though they are conceptually easy to understand and pedagogically convenient to use, these pairs of either/or concepts also tend to assume that translation is static and context-free. Tymoczko (2000: 38) criticizes the dichotomy of domesticating/foreignizing as “a kind of absolute or universal standard of evaluation, with a sort of on/off quality rather than a sliding scale.” In fact, researchers are usually tempted “to reduce a vast and extremely heterogeneous body of scholarship to a set of idealised tenets” (Baker 2001: 9), but translatorial actions and phenomena in the real world are far more complex. The study of translation history, which involves translation produced decades ago, is even more so.