18·19세기 동아시아와 知識·情報의 메신저, 譯官

Abstract

Most remarkably, translating officials themselves played an active role as the subject of knowledge/information who conveyed knowledge and information with their own intellectual capacities. For a new understanding of yeohang 閭巷 literature, we should pay due attention to those translating officials who played a key role in producing knowledge/information and circulating it. Translating officials not only had abundant knowledge through traveling experiences, but also could obtain much information on new books by way of mediating the book trade. It was a few leading scholar-officials who evaluated and criticized the knowledge/information provided by translating officials, but such intellectual impacts made by those scholar-officials were limited to domestic knowledge/information. As far as knowledge to the foreign was concerned, translating officials played an active role as its subject by evaluating, receiving, and even recreating it. In this sense, these translating officials were the sender of knowledge/information. We should not limit our focus to the literary works written by translating officials, in reconsidering their literary and cultural impact in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We should reexamine their role to bridge international cultural exchange if we attempt to appreciate their true cultural impact on Korean society. Furthermore, we should reexamine their contribution to the reception of new knowledge/information and its circulation and the social influence made by their knowledge of foreign countries.