동아시아의 번역된 근대: ‘개인’과 ‘사회’의 번역과 수용

Abstract

Modern East Asia understood the Western civilization and constructed new order of modernity by the means of translation. The problem how to translate and popularize new concepts containing the Western study, thought and institution was an urgent task given to the then intellect of East Asia and translation was the important process and manner forming modernity in East Asia. Modernity of East Asia was ‘translated modernity’ in this way. This paper tries to explore the landscape of East Asian modernity as ‘translated modernity’ by the way how ‘individual’ and ‘society’ were translated into ‘個人’ and ‘社會’ and these concepts were accepted by East Asia. Translation of the Western concepts was accompanied by double difficulty. The fact that there was no reliable dictionary was the first problem, but the more fundamental difficulty came from the fact that the concept or phenomenon to be translated did not exist then, that is it was not the ‘existing’ reality but the reality ‘ought to be exist’ that was the object to be translated. We can examine the variation of meaning made by translated loans which objects were not he ‘existing’ reality but the reality ‘ought to be exist’ through the two example, i.e. ‘個人’ and ‘社會’.