Revisiting the Bible Translation of Robert Morrison and William Milne

Abstract

The article revisits the collaborative project of two early missionaries to China, Robert Morrison and William Milne, who overcame the ‘practical impossibility’ of translating the Protestant Bible into Chinese in 1823. The issues of the doctrinal constraints, the influence of the contemporary English translations, faithfulness to the Hebrew text and cultural sensitivity to the target language will be raised with reference to concrete examples cited from their joint translation version. The creation account of Genesis and passages on the rendering of the biblical ‘sea monsters’ into Chinese will be selected for focused study in order to show how Morrison and Milne were influenced by the KJV but at times departed from it in their reading of the original Hebrew text. Furthermore, it is also noted that they have shown a certain degree of sensitivity to the Chinese cultural context in their choice of terminology in translating the biblical text into Chinese.