Cultural translation in Jesuit Missionaries’ Chinese scientific texts: some remarks on Ludovico Buglio’s Falconry treatise of 1679

This article analyses from a cross-cultural view a Chinese book of the seventeenth century, Jincheng yinglun (Treatise on Falcons), written by Ludovico Buglio, an Italian Jesuit who did a partial translation of liber sextus of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae (De Falconibus in Genere), published in Bologna in various editions from 1596 to 1598. The article begins with a short introduction focused on cross-cultural theories and cultural translation, and then, after a synoptic historical and biographical section, tries to dig inside this translation in order to observe some phenomena of cultural translation, taking into consideration all possible agents: the Jesuits, their Chinese collaborators, the original Western books and their Chinese versions. The theoretical framework applied partially comes from the historical linguistics approach, trying to follow the path of a more cross-cultural perspective.