Introduction
The topic of this volume of Studies in Church History is ‘Translating Christianity’, a very broad but important theme. This article does not present new facts on the life and work of the Scottish missionary to China, John Ross (1842–1915), but rather reflects on his work and its importance in the development of the Christian Church in Korea.Footnote 1 Ross was unquestionably one of the key figures in late nineteenth-century missions in China, and he was effectively the father of the Protestant Church in both Manchuria and Korea. To understand his role in planting Protestant Christianity in Northeast Asia, the concept of ‘translation’ is a useful idea by which we can grasp how he accomplished his goals as a missionary.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘translation’ as ‘[t]he action or process of turning from one language into another; also the product of this’. It goes on to state that figuratively the word could mean ‘the expression of something in another medium or form’.Footnote 2 It is this figurative use which is the topic of this article: ‘how can Christianity be presented in an understandable way to nations which do not have a “Christian” background?’ One could say that missionary work by its very nature is a process of ‘translating’ the ideas, beliefs and practices of, say, Christianity into another medium or form, whether in antiquity or in more modern history. Linguistic translation, for example the translation of the Bible, is never a matter of word-for-word correspondence, but of attempting to find the best means to represent the meaning of the original text using words and concepts from the receptor culture's language, which, however, may also have resonances beyond the immediate verbal correspondence. The same could be said of the ritual practices of a religion, and the plastic and musical arts which are used to express aspects of its belief. There is no one-to-one correspondence. This article will explore as a case study how one late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century missionary attempted to translate Protestant Christianity in the context of north-east Asian culture and civilization.
To understand Ross's later work, we must understand his cultural and religious background.Footnote 3 He was born on 9 August 1842 in the village of Balintore, Easter Ross (eastern Ross-shire), near Inverness. His father is said to have been a tailor, and his mother the local schoolmistress. At that time, Easter Ross was a Gaelic-speaking area, and Ross's first language was Gaelic. He only acquired English later at school. Three important things about Ross and his approach to mission should therefore be noted. First, because the area in which he grew up was not a native English-speaking area, from a very early age John Ross was aware of the importance of knowing more than one language. Second, although the Balintore area was Gaelic-speaking, it was not remote from the world, and was comparatively cosmopolitan. The village overlooked the Moray Firth and from there ships sailing to and from Inverness and eastern Europe and other parts of the world would have been a daily sight. Third, his family was ‘cosmopolitan’ in the sense that their work would have brought them into contact with the wider world. It is not unreasonable to suppose that as a child Ross may have dreamed of travelling and working in distant regions of the globe.
There is a fourth factor which will have moulded John Ross's view of the world: the Church to which the family belonged. The Rosses were not members of the Church of Scotland, but belonged to a group of dissenters from the established Church, the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The United Presbyterians, the country's third largest Protestant denomination, were a more liberal form of Scottish Presbyterianism, and were noted especially for involvement in world mission. Scottish missions in China were for many years the preserve of this denomination. Family membership in this branch of Scottish Presbyterianism meant that Ross would have been influenced by a more culturally liberal atmosphere, but also by a strong sense of the importance of world mission.Footnote 4
Having completed his MA at the University of Glasgow, Ross trained for the ministry at the United Presbyterian Theological Hall in Edinburgh. Following completion of his studies, he was assigned to work in Gaelic-speaking churches because he was a native speaker of the language. Notwithstanding his commitment to Gaelic-language ministry, Ross had a strong sense of calling to be an overseas missionary. His chosen field was India, but the Church sent him to China instead.
Early Missionary Career
Although the subject of this article is Ross in relation to the earliest translation of the New Testament into Korean, he was first and foremost a missionary to the Chinese. Korea and the translation of Scripture into Korean was always a secondary work. At the time that Ross was sent to China, the missionary work of the United Presbyterian Church there was concentrated in the Shandong peninsula. After a three-month sea journey, on 23 August 1872 Ross and his wife arrived at Chefoo (芝罘, in pinyin Zhīfú), the principal port for the area and the base of the United Presbyterian missions. However, no sooner had they had arrived than the head of the United Presbyterian mission, Alexander Williamson (1829–90), advised them to go to Yingkou (營口, in pinyin Yíngkŏu), the port at the mouth of the Liao River and the gateway to the vast area of Manchuria. He urged them to do so as quickly as possible as winter was approaching and the Bohai (渤海) Sea soon would freeze over. Consequently, the Rosses found themselves in Yingkou within a month of arriving in Shandong. Why had Williamson made such an urgent plea?
The answer to that question lies in Williamson's sense of mission and his vision for north-east Asia.Footnote 5 Williamson was not only the head of the United Presbyterian missions in China, but had also been the representative in China for the National Bible Society of Scotland since 1863. He was interested in finding new areas for missionary development, and was looking for new opportunities for the translation and distribution of Scripture. Manchuria was a wide open field for mission work. Williamson had travelled to the area on more than one occasion, and in 1867 had also visited the ‘Corean Gate’ (高麗門, Kaoli-men), or customs barrier between Qing (淸; 1644–1912) China and Chosŏn (朝鮮; 1392–1910) Korea. He saw that there was a great opportunity for pioneer missionary work in Manchuria, and also that there was the opportunity to consider missionary work in Korea through the translation of Scripture. He urged the Rosses to go to Manchuria so that they could make an early start on pioneer work in this vast territory which had no effective Protestant missionary presence.Footnote 6
Tragedy struck Ross immediately after the couple reached Yingkou. Mrs Ross, who had been pregnant during their journey to China, died shortly after their arrival in Yingkou while giving birth to their son Drummond.Footnote 7 Distressed, Ross appears to have buried himself in the energetic pursuit of his work. He became convinced that the centre of missions in Manchuria had to be in the Manchurian capital, not in a Western treaty port such as Yingkou.Footnote 8 Consequently, in 1874 Ross moved to Mukden (瀋 陽, Shenyang) and made the capital the terminus of a series of projected ‘mission stations’ beginning at Yingkou. Using Mukden as his base, Ross began to travel widely throughout Manchuria and, not forgetting the suggestions made to him by Williamson, he too visited the ‘Corean Gate’ in October 1874. His visit there, at the time when the customs barrier was formally opened for an international market, was for the purpose of obtaining the services of someone who could be a Korean language tutor for him. Unsuccessful in his first visit, he returned to the ‘Corean Gate’ for a much longer stay during April and May 1876. This time he was successful in recruiting a tutor.Footnote 9
His visits to the Sino-Korean customs barrier indicate that from the very earliest period of his missionary work in Manchuria, Ross had a strong interest in the translation of the Christian Scriptures into Korean. At that time, entrance into Chosŏn Korea was closed to all but Chinese diplomatic missions and other specially exempted groups. Ross conceived of beginning the evangelization of the Korean peninsula through the translation and distribution of Scripture, an idea undoubtedly reflecting Williamson's approach, but also reflecting his own bilingual childhood.
From the very beginning of his missionary work, language acquisition, translation and writing formed an important element of that work. In 1876, when he had been in China for four years, Ross published his first book, the Mandarin Primer. Although there is no concrete evidence to verify this, the structure and order of material in this book seem to indicate that it was based upon Ross's own programme of study of the Chinese language. The following year, he published another work, the Corean Primer. Although not identical to the earlier book, the Corean Primer follows many of the ideas of the Mandarin Primer, and must reflect Ross's own study of the Korean language. It was published a little over a year after his second visit to the ‘Corean Gate’ and his acquisition of a Korean language tutor.
1876 was a critical year in the development of John Ross's missionary work. Mukden, the Manchurian capital, had become his residence and the centre of his work. He had made a successful second visit to the ‘Corean Gate’ and had acquired a Korean language tutor, and had made enough headway with understanding this language to be able to use his studies as the basis of a language textbook for use by missionaries when they would be able to enter the so-called ‘Hermit Kingdom’. Most notably, by the end of the year, Ross had been able to gather around him and his future brother-in-law John McIntyre (1837–1905) a group of Korean herbal merchants who would form a panel for the translation of the New Testament into the Korean language. From the first he established principles of this translation work which will be discussed below.
When Ross went on his first furlough in 1879, he took with him the first draft of the Korean translation of parts of the New Testament and the manuscripts of two books: History of Corea, Ancient and Modern with Description of Manners and Customs, Language and Geography and The Manchus, or the Reigning Dynasty of China. The first book was published that same year, and the second the year after. Together, they formed a comprehensive history of north-east Asia. The History of Corea was the first presentation in any European language of the history of Korea, while the second was one of only a handful of works on the Manchus. The two books represented Ross's view of the indissoluble connection between the histories of the two regions. He was, perhaps, the first European to understand this.
The translation work which Ross and McIntyre undertook also saw fruition with the publication in Korean of the Gospel according to St Luke in 1882. This was followed by the complete translation and publication of the New Testament in 1887. By the end of his first fifteen years in East Asia, then, Ross had laid the solid foundation for the development of Chinese Protestantism in Manchuria; he had made significant contributions to supporting language acquisition by creating language-teaching resources for both Mandarin and Korean; he had overseen the earliest translation of the New Testament into Korean; and he had made pioneering contributions to the study of the history of both China and Korea. Any one of these could have been a life's work.
Ross's missionary work in all its aspects was aided by his formidable knowledge of, and appreciation of, languages. A close reading of his writings indicate that he had a working knowledge of eleven different languages: Gaelic, English, German, French, classical Latin, New Testament Greek, biblical Hebrew, classical written Chinese, contemporary spoken Mandarin Chinese, Manchu and Korean. Of these, he certainly spoke four: Gaelic, English, Mandarin and Manchu.Footnote 10
Features of the Korean Language
Before we can look at the process of how Ross translated Scripture into Korean, we have to understand three things: the linguistic structure of the language, the ways in which it has been recorded by indigenous scripts, and the sociocultural background which influenced the way in which the language was and is used.Footnote 11
The Korean language is a member of the broad Uralo-Altaic language family, which also includes Japanese, Manchu, Mongolian and a number of the languages of Siberia. These languages are characterized by three features: atonality, a polysyllabic word structure and agglutination. Korean possesses all three of these features, which makes it dissimilar to Chinese, but similar to Japanese.
Tonality is a key feature of Chinese, but is entirely absent in Korean which is characterized by a flat sound level throughout a sentence until the end, when rising inflection indicates a question and a falling inflection a declaration. Classical Chinese is believed to have been monosyllabic, and contemporary Chinese is not characterized by an extensive polysyllabic word structure or morphology. Korean, however, possesses a highly polysyllabic morphology.
Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the Korean language is its extensive use of agglutination, the grammatical feature in which the function of each word in a sentence is marked out by either a prefix or a suffix. Korean makes extensive use of suffix agglutination. English differentiates between an adjective and an adverb by the addition of ‘-ly’ to indicate an adverb (thus: ‘quick’ and ‘quickly’). However, English has very few examples of agglutination, whereas in Korean every word will have an agglutination marker indicating subject, direct object, direction of movement, intent and other aspects.
A key feature of a Korean sentence is the verb. As with other Uralo-Altaic languages, Korean has the sentence structure of subject, object, verb. The verb itself has a number of agglutinative markers attached to it, and could be a whole sentence when translated into English. The structural order of a Korean verb is verb stem + tense marker + marker for level of respect to the person spoken to + sentence type marker. Speech level (marking in speech the degree of respect towards the person addressed) represents a key feature of Korean culture as it is a mark of respect and etiquette. It is also possible in the agglutinated verb to make the sentence even more honorific (and thus to raise the speech level) by inserting an honorific marker between the verb stem and the tense marker. Additionally, there is a class of verbs which are honorific but have the same ‘meaning’ as a ‘standard’ verb. The marker placed at the end of the agglutinated verb indicates whether the verb or sentence is making a declarative statement, asking a direct question, asking a reflective question, making a command, making a suggestion or quoting someone else's sentence (also indicating whether the quoted sentence is a declarative sentence, interrogative sentence, command or suggestion). Korean does not require punctuation in the middle or at the end of sentences, because the ‘punctuation’ is built in with the function markers.
The subject or the object in a sentence can be removed, and the verb itself would make sense. However, no sentence could make any sense without a verb. An example of how a single verb could be a sentence in English is exemplified by the agglutinated verb hwaganasyŏtchyo? (화가나셨죠, ‘You were angry, weren't you?’) We have the verb hwagana + honorific marker s + past tense marker yŏt + reflexive question marker chyo. This description immediately indicates that a translation into English does not fully reflect the meaning of the Korean sentence as there is no way in English to indicate speech level. Removing the honorific marker in Korean subtly changes the meaning of the sentence, whereas in English there is no way to indicate speech level except through a comment or footnote explaining the type of speech level.
Speech level is important in ordinary Korean speech as it creates mood, the mood of relationship between the person speaking and the person spoken to, and in some cases the person spoken about. Two anecdotes will indicate the importance of speech levels. In the early 1970s while I was in Korean language school during the first two years of my work as an educational missionary in Korea, I made the acquaintance of a woman from Scandinavia who had learned Korean, but was horrified by the whole idea of speech levels because it offended her principles of egalitarianism. So, she decided to use the most simple form of speech, panmal (반말, informal or relaxed speech, literally ‘half talk’), which is used when addressing a small child. She complained to me how uncooperative her Korean co-workers were. They seemed to do everything grudgingly. Every time she spoke, she was insulting everyone but a five-year-old. If she had instead chosen the most general form of honorific speech, no one would have been offended, even if she had used it with a five-year-old child; rather they would undoubtedly have complimented her on her use of the Korean language. Mood is important.
Even Koreans get the subtleties of the language wrong, as can be appreciated from this second anecdote. One day, a Korean friend, his younger brother and I were talking together. At one point, the younger brother said: ‘Hyŏng-nim (형님, honourable elder brother)’. His elder brother responded. The younger brother said: ‘No, not you, hyŏng (형), I meant hyŏng-nim’, indicating me. Nim (님) is an honorific marker added to nouns describing persons. Because in Korean close friends are referred as elder brothers (as I was in this case), and because the young man's relationship to me was mediated through his relationship as the younger brother of my friend, he had to indicate that there was a difference between the two of us. This is a point that at the time even my Korean friend had missed. In social relations, Korean has a high degree of complexity. There are no level relationships between people. Every relationship is hierarchical in some sense, and this must be indicated in the spoken language.
This distinction in social status must be indicated in written material translated into Korean as well as in spoken language. A simple example would be the Korean translation of the children's story Winnie the Pooh. In Korean, the difference between Pooh as a toy bear and Christopher Robin as his owner must be indicated. Hence, in the Korean translation Christopher Robin when speaking with Pooh uses informal speech, mentioned above, while Pooh when speaking with Christopher Robin uses a polite level of speech, as if he were talking to an adult. The broad ‘meaning’ of their conversations is the same, but the mood would be very different if they both spoke in the same speech level. This distinction is absolutely necessary in Korean, but it is virtually impossible to indicate it in English without making a very awkward sentence, or using a footnote.
There is one other important feature of the Korean language: its onomatopoeia. The phonology of the Korean language is very extensive, including a range of ‘standard’ consonants, aspirated consonants and ‘tense’ consonants; ‘standard’ vowels, vowels beginning with a ‘y’, monophthongs and diphthongs. Phonologically, Korean is an extraordinarily rich language. This gives it a wealth of opportunities for use in poetry and for indicating or imitating natural sounds. This feature also means that it is difficult to render Korean in any form of script other than a fully phonetic script. Discussion of this feature brings us naturally to the challenge of recording or transcribing the Korean language.
Transcribing the Korean Language
In East Asia, the classic written language was written Chinese, which used complicated monosyllabic ideographs to represent words or combinations of words. The early Korean states received the written language of China as a part of world civilization in the same way that the peoples of northern Europe received Graeco-Roman civilization. However, the Greeks and Romans used phonetic scripts. The Chinese did not. Writing for the early Korean states meant writing in a foreign language using a script appropriate for that foreign language, but which was unable to transcribe the early Korean language and its key grammatical features.Footnote 12
Very early on, probably not later than the seventh or eighth centuries CE, the Koreans devised three different types of script to transform Chinese sentences so that they could be read as Korean sentences by putting into the Chinese sentence necessary features of the early Korean language in order to make the sentence comprehensible. The three scripts were called idu (吏讀), kugyŏl (口訣) and hyangch'al (鄕札).Footnote 13 It is not necessary here to discuss the differences between them or explain why these different scripts were created. Two points can be made. First, although the characters in these three scripts were all phonetic, the scripts were not alphabets but syllabaries. That is, each symbol represented not a single sound but a syllable. Second, each symbol was derived from a portion of a Chinese character which was felt to represent the sound of a particular Korean syllable. Modern Japanese kana (仮名) scripts work on this same principle, and indeed they look remarkably like one of the early Korean syllabaries.Footnote 14
By the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was becoming obvious to many Koreans that the system of writing and transcribing was becoming increasingly awkward. The educated elite wrote in a foreign language and additionally used local derivative scripts which were not suitable for writing Korean as a whole. The issue came to a head under King Sejong (世宗; r.1418–50), who created a royal research institute known as the Chiphyŏn-jŏn (集賢殿) or Hall of Assembled Worthies. It is said that the king wanted to create a genuinely phonetic script for three reasons. First of all, he wanted a phonetic script, a genuine alphabet, to transcribe actual Korean language. There was an administrative reason for this. When a magistrate sat in court, the discussions and decisions were recorded in a foreign written language, classical written Chinese. The king wanted to know what was actually said in court, and not to read a translation of what had happened. The second reason for wanting a phonetic alphabet was to record the onomatopoetic sounds of the Korean language. Using a phonetic script meant that it would be possible to write poetry in the Korean language rather than using the script and conventions of China. The third reason for the creation of a Korean alphabet was to have a phonetic means to write the sounds of foreign languages, that is, to write foreign words phonetically so that the foreign words could be read ‘properly’.
Promulgated by royal edict in 1443, the phonetic Korean alphabet was based upon the sophisticated linguistic study of the phonetic structure of the Korean language by the Chiphyŏn-jŏn scholars.Footnote 15 Consisting originally of twenty-eight letters, this alphabet was first called Hunmin chŏngŭm (訓民正音, Teaching the People Correct Speech) which reflected the king's view that the use of the script would raise the standards of literacy and education amongst the general populace. It was immediately rejected by the literati elite. A minister of state addressed the throne and expressed his fear that as local scripts were only used by ‘barbarians’, use of a Korean script would separate the Koreans from East Asian civilization; it would be an embarrassment to the Koreans in front of the Chinese; and it would lead to a national moral decline because people would no longer read the Confucian classical literature.Footnote 16 Although the indigenous phonetic script was used for the next four centuries, it was considered to be the preserve of the uneducated and women. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the widespread popular use of the alphabet began. It would become known as Han'gŭl (한글), and would also become a primary symbol of Korean nationalism.
Cultural Issues in Translation
Consideration of these strictly linguistic aspects of the Korean language, taken together with the attempts over a number of centuries to create a system of writing which would adequately and simply transcribe the sounds of the language, has given some insight into the sociocultural features of the Korean language. From at least the fourth century, early Korean states absorbed world civilization, which emanated from political entities which we now identify as ‘China’. Broadly speaking this flow of East Asian civilization into Korea consisted of a script (Chinese characters), a religion (Buddhism) and a sociopolitical philosophy (Confucianism). The last proved to be the most influential of the three. Confucianism was a philosophy which addressed the questions of what makes for good government and for a good society. The whole panoply of Confucian influence led to the creation of a meritocratic, bureaucratic scholarly elite (the Confucian literati) to govern the state, a system of education to train people in Confucian philosophy so that the state could be governed appropriately, and a civil service examination system to select the governing elite on a meritocratic basis.
This system of sociopolitical philosophy dominated the political, intellectual, and social scenes in Korea for fifteen hundred years. Until the end of the fourteenth century, the influence of Confucianism was largely in the political and cultural spheres. It did not completely dominate the social sphere. Religions such as Buddhism were seen to have a place in society. The relationship between Buddhism and Confucianism changed radically with the rise of Neo-Confucianism, which when applied in Korea at the beginning of the Chosŏn dynasty at the end of the fourteenth century led to five centuries of government attempts to create a model Confucian society during which the social aspects of Confucianism were enforced by the state.Footnote 17
Confucius's analysis of society showed that there were five role relationships in which all people participated. These were the relationship between the ruler and the governed, parent and child, spouse and spouse, sibling and sibling, and friend and friend. None of these relationships was level; they were all hierarchical. Each relationship also implied that those in a ‘superior’ relationship had certain duties of care and concern for those in the ‘inferior’ status. Each of these relationships was characterized by a set of moral values which were to be acted upon. The relationship between the ruler and governed was characterized by benevolence on the ruler's part and loyalty on the part of the governed. The relationship between parent and child was characterized by benevolence on the part of the parent and ‘filial piety’ on the part of the child. The hierarchical nature of social relationships in Korea was not the creation of Confucianism, but existed previously. However, Confucianism, particularly in its Neo-Confucian form, reinforced these ideas, and centuries of state policy intended to create a model Confucian society reinforced these values still more. These concepts are naturally expressed in the way people speak, and how their ideas are represented in writing.Footnote 18
In translation into Korean, therefore, two matters have to be kept in mind at all times. The focus of the Confucian analysis of society is on the propriety of social relationships. Consequently, propriety needs to be represented in the speech levels used in address and in general speech, and also in the terms of reference, the words used to describe a person including the use of honorific markers in the agglutination of nouns. The use of the suffix nim, discussed above, is an example of the alteration of a word to indicate propriety of social relationship.
Ross's Principles for Translation
When Ross was starting to gather together a group of men who would form a panel of translators and translate the New Testament into Korean for the first time, he established four basic principles which were to guide their work. The men whom he selected to help him were not members of the yangban (兩班) or aristocratic scholarly elite. Rather, his assistants were merchants of herbal medicines who bought and sold in China. They were some of the few people who could cross the border at designated times, and who participated in the international market at the ‘Corean Gate’ customs barrier. They were not scholarly, but they could read Chinese, and undoubtedly spoke it for commercial purposes. They would have been familiar with Confucian thought and could read the basic texts. The same translators did not participate in the group from beginning to end, nor were there the same number of translators at all times. Nonetheless, the same type of person was involved in the process of translation throughout, and the four principles established by Ross guided the work of the translation panel from start to finish. Ross and his brother-in-law McIntyre acted as supervisory editors, looking at each draft of the manuscript and making editorial decisions.Footnote 19
What were the principles which guided Ross's work of translation? First, he had determined that the translation must be in an idiom and script which could be read by all Koreans. His concern for a non-scholarly, accurate but accessible translation derived from his own views about the various Chinese versions of the Bible, which had been a topic of major debate amongst missionaries in China for decades.Footnote 20 Ross wanted a Bible which could be read with understanding by anyone, but which would also be a literary work. The Korean alphabet was a great discovery for him because in effect it meant that anyone could read the Scriptures: because that script was alphabetic and phonetic there was no barrier to reading and understanding as there was with the ideographic, non-phonetic Chinese script.
The second principle which Ross established is what Eugene Nida and others have referred to as ‘dynamic equivalence’. That is, he chose to use words which might not be the exact equivalent of the word to be translated, but which carried the same cultural sense as the original. A typical example would be early translations into Inuit (Eskimo) where ‘seal’ is substituted for ‘lamb’ as in ‘Lamb of God’. At the time of the original translation, the readers of an Inuit Bible would have never seen, much less known about, an animal called a ‘lamb’.Footnote 21 This principle of dynamic equivalence meant for Ross that he should seek to use an indigenous Korean word wherever possible, rather than transliterating a European term or using an established Chinese-language term. Ross's best known choice of a Korean word is the term which he chose for ‘God’.
The battle over what word to use for ‘God’ in Chinese was at the heart of the ‘Term Question’, first as it was fought over amongst the Roman Catholic missionaries in China,Footnote 22 and then later amongst nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. There are essentially three options: to use an existing term, to transliterate a Latin or Greek word using Chinese characters, or to create an entirely new term.Footnote 23 In Korea, as in China, the Roman Catholic Church settled on the last of these options, which then became the standard term used formally by Roman Catholics in Korea.Footnote 24
However, although the issue of the ‘Term Question’ had been settled for Korean Catholics, it was not yet settled for Korean Protestants. The same issues were raised again in the early years of Protestant missions in Korea as had arisen in China centuries before. However, the Korean Protestants’ choice was different. The term chosen for ‘God’ was an indigenous Korean term, and not a neologism. It was the term which Ross had used from the beginning in his work of translation, Hananim (하나님), which literally means ‘Heaven’, or the ‘Ruler of Heaven’. It is formed from a dialectical form of hanŭl (하늘), hanal (하날), meaning ‘Heaven’ or ‘heavens’ and the honorific suffix nim. Ross eschewed the use of the Chinese term Sangje (上帝, in Chinese Shangdi), which had finally been chosen by the Protestant missionaries in China, a native term rather than a neologism or transliteration. Ross's sense that an indigenous term was preferable meant that although he favoured the use of Shangdi in Chinese translation, in translating Korean he favoured a Korean term, despite the fact that the Chinese-character term would have been familiar to any Korean who could read the Chinese script. What mattered most, in Ross's view, was the principle that a Korean term should have preference over a non-Korean term.Footnote 25
The third principle was to make use of the Bible in Chinese as a basis for the Korean translation when searching for and selecting technical terms such as nouns, place names or theological concepts. The translation panel used the Delegates’ Version of the Bible in Chinese as the basis of their work,Footnote 26 but Ross and McIntyre also made reference to the Greek New Testament and the Revised Version of the Bible in English. Because the translation panel consisted primarily of Koreans who were literate in written Chinese, the principle was that the Korean translators would work from the Chinese translation to produce a text which would be verified and emended by the Scottish editors. Understanding the Chinese terms, it would be possible for the Korean translators to suggest whether a Chinese-character term should remain or be replaced by an indigenous word.
The fourth principle was that the text must reflect social distinctions in speech. We have discussed above how important these distinctions are in Korean, at a very subtle level, in giving the correct mood and tone to the sentence. Ross's sensitivity to this issue of mood, tone and shade of meaning probably derives from the fact that he was bilingual from early childhood and that he would have been very aware of just how different Gaelic and English are.
The Process of Translation
Both Ross and McIntyre left fairly detailed descriptions of how the translation panel actually worked. There is no day-to-day description of the work, but their records offer a good account of how it proceeded. The first book of the New Testament to be translated into Korean was the Gospel of Luke. The work generated a fourfold series of drafts, the process being repeated until a satisfactory final version was felt to have been achieved. In the case of Luke, the first stage was the translation from the Delegates’ Version into Korean using only Han'gŭl script. This initial translation then became the basis of the remaining stages of the translation process. The second draft of the manuscript took the first draft and amended it by reading through the entire text and checking it with the Greek text and with the Revised Version of the Bible in English. The third draft was based upon the second draft, and resulted from checking and rechecking the Korean with the Greek- and English-language New Testaments until a fully amended text had been achieved. In the fourth draft stage, the Scottish editors took the third draft and went through the entire text of Luke, reading it along with the Greek concordance in order to ensure consistency of terms except in the case of differences in word usage.
In translating Luke, the translators repeated this whole process four times in order to attain a text which adhered to the principles established by Ross, and which also was as faithful as possible to the original text and its meaning. The editors made use of an existing translation which would be comprehensible to the Korean translators; they undertook extensive cross-referencing with the original Greek text and with the standard English translation of their day; and they used the principal tools for translation, such as a Greek-language concordance. The process which was established by Ross and McIntyre for the translation of Luke was adhered to for all subsequent translations of each book of the New Testament. It was as thorough and accurate as possible given the fact that it was impossible at this time for Europeans to be resident in Korea.
The Ross Translation or Ross Version, as it came to be known, was the first complete translation of the Christian New Testament into the Korean language. It set a standard by which all other translations would be judged. However, it had one peculiarity to which some early Protestant missionaries objected. Because it had been translated using a phonetic script by Koreans from the north-western area of the peninsula, the translators put the translation into their dialect of Korean. Ross was well aware of this feature of the translation, but felt that it did not make the translation incomprehensible to Koreans from other regions of the country. The acceptance of a regional dialect as the basis of this translation adhered, perhaps in a curious way, to Ross's principle of using idiomatic speech, although it is also important to remember that he did not have access to translators from the capital. However, use of the dialect of the capital could have been viewed as contravening Ross's idea that a translation should not be a ‘scholarly’ translation.
Effect of the Ross Translation
Unquestionably, the Ross Translation was a literary, cultural and religious monument in the history of modern Korea. The translation of the New Testament had four noticeable effects. It enabled the rapid spread of Christian ideas and beliefs. Because Korea at the end of the nineteenth century was a ‘closed’ country, it was virtually impossible for foreign missionaries to work there. Ross conceived the idea that the Christian faith and belief could be spread through the distribution of translations of the Bible or parts of it. Here the use of the herbal merchants was important. They moved back and forth between Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, taking with them their various medicinal materials and products, now including the New Testament. Ross asked these merchants, many of whom had been part of the translation panel, to take copies of Luke's Gospel and later also other biblical books with them, and to distribute these books for free with the medicines which they dispensed. The Ross Version thus became the foundation of a self-evangelized, self-propagating Church which spread through Korea largely before the advent of foreign missionaries.Footnote 27 By the time that the first missionaries, American Methodists and Presbyterians, arrived in 1884 there were gathered groups of Christians in communities from north of the Yalu River (which was Korean territory at that time), along the north western coast of Korea as far down as the capital.Footnote 28
The second major effect of the Ross Translation was that many of the terms which Ross and his team of translators chose to represent Christian concepts became the norm in the Korean language. Most notable among these was the choice of the term Hananim (하나님) for ‘God’. There are some variations. The Kongdong pŏnyŏk (Common Translation) undertaken by a team of Korean Catholic and Protestant scholars in the early 1970s used Hanŭnim (하느님), from the abbreviated form Hanŭ (하느) for ‘Heaven’ and nim, but this has not gained widespread acceptance.Footnote 29 Moreover, although the Korean translation of the Qur’ān transcribes the Arabic term Allah in the Han'gŭl script, I have known Korean Muslims to refer to God as Hananim, even in the main mosque in Seoul.
Moreover, whenever there has been a difference of opinion about the correct – or most appropriate – term to use in the Korean Bible, even when a change has been made, in the end general usage has reverted to the term selected by Ross and his team. The most notable example of this is the choice of term for the final book of the New Testament, the Revelation of St John. The term chosen by Ross was Muksi-rok (默示錄), meaning a record of a dream or vision. Subsequent translations have used the term Kyesi-rok (啓示錄), meaning a record of a prophetic statement, which could of course include a vision of what will happen. This latter term was in use in Korea in the early 1970s. However, the most recent translation of the Bible into Korean has reverted to using the term used in the Ross Translation as most clearly reflecting the content and intent of the book. Decisions such as this show that Ross's work has stood the test of time.
The third effect of the Ross Translation was the impetus which it created for the widespread use of the indigenous alphabet. Before the translation of the Bible into Korean, the Han'gŭl alphabet had a relatively low status. It was thought by the traditional elite, steeped in Confucian learning and the use of the Chinese script, to be suitable for use only by women and those unlearned in the Confucian classics. The ability of anyone to read the Bible in Korean meant that through the use of the alphabet anyone could read anything, and do it easily. The script rapidly became not only a means to educate people and to enable them to communicate more easily, but also a symbol of Korean nationalism. At the end of the nineteenth century, as the Kaehwa-dang (開化黨) or reform party strove to throw off the shackles of the past, including Confucianism, and build a modern nation, the alphabet came to be seen as a symbol of what Korea had achieved and could achieve.Footnote 30 In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the reform party's newspaper The Independent was a bilingual paper in English and in Korean; the latter was written entirely in the Han'gŭl alphabet. The two languages and scripts were seen to be emblems of modernity and progress. This connection with nationalism was not lost during the years of Japanese colonial occupation (1910–45). When the Republic of Korea was established in 1948, one of the national holidays which was created was Han'gŭl-lal (한글날, Korean Alphabet Day), celebrated on 9 October.Footnote 31
A fourth effect of the Ross translation is that it preserved for the first time a provincial dialect, the dialect of P'yŏngan-do (平安道) province in the north-western part of the Korean peninsula. It was unusual, if not unique, to have whole texts written in Korean. It was certainly not common to see regional variations of Korean recorded and treated with the same dignity which would have been given to the dialect of the capital. For linguistic scholars this is especially important because it helps them to see the language of this region as it was encapsulated in the native script at the end of the nineteenth century.
The work of John Ross, his brother-in-law John McIntyre, and all the named and unnamed Koreans who worked on this translation was in many respects monumental. They were all translators in every sense: scriptural, religious and cultural translators, spreading new religious ideas and beliefs, who had a cultural and social impact far beyond the religion whose spread was enabled by the translation of Christian Scripture into the national language. The Ross Translation did indeed help to spread Christianity around the Korean peninsula, but it also spread literacy, promoted a sense of nationalism in difficult times, and left an important linguistic record of a regional dialect for use as a resource for scholars. This is quite an achievement. And yet for Ross, this work of translation into Korean, however important, was secondary to his work in China.
Appendix: Books authored by John Ross
Mandarin Primer: Being Easy Lessons for Beginners, Transliterated according to the European Mode of using Roman Letters (Shanghai, 1876).
Corean Primer: Being Lessons in Corean on all Ordinary Subjects, Trans- literated on the Principles of the Mandarin Primer (Shanghai, 1877).
History of Corea, Ancient and Modern with Description of Manners and Cus- toms, Language and Geography (Paisley, 1879).
The Manchus, or the Reigning Dynasty of China (Paisley, 1880).
Korean Speech with Grammar and Vocabulary (Shanghai, 1882).
Yesu syŏnggyo chyŏnsyŏ [Complete Sacred Writings of Jesus = New Testament in Korean] (Mukden, 1887).
Old Wang, the First Chinese Evangelist in Manchuria (London, 1889).
Mission Methods in Manchuria (Edinburgh and London, 1903).
The Marvellous Story of the Revival in Manchuria (Edinburgh, 1908).
The Original Religion of China (Edinburgh, 1909).
The Origin of the Chinese People (Edinburgh, 1916).
