翻譯澳門：歷史中的知識網絡

Unquestionably, Macao was the first site in Asia where translation from and to Chinese and European languages emerged and flourished. Back to Macao’s foundation, historians describe several stages in this process, commencing with the ad hoc employment of jurubaças including missionaries and, in the modern period, with the creation of a corps of interpreters of Chinese language (1865) as part of a government department, leading to the setting up in 1915 of the first (formal) school for qualifying translators, albeit not surviving the war years. Yet outside of government and down unto the present, knowledge production on Macao is the work of individuals, some Sinologists, some masters of Western languages and some amateurs. Macao then offers itself as a fitting testing ground both from within translation studies, itself a field at the interstices of several disciplines, and as a longitudinal study of practicalities of commerce and governance. This paper seeks to draw attention to Macao’s knowledge networks across history with particular attention to problems of translation and interpretation down to the present bearing in mind that bilingualism in Portuguese-Chinese is enshrined in the Basic Law.