The microlevel: Eco-translation operational illustrations

Abstract

China has an academic tendency to prioritize practice that has descended from the tradition of “unity of knowledge and practice.” There is an old Chinese saying in Xunzi:Another saying, by Zhu Xi, a Song Dynasty Confucian scholar, is “With respect to order, knowledge comes first, and with respect to importance, action is more important” because “action produces the effect of knowledge, while knowledge does not produce the effect of action.” For Wang Yangming, a philosopher during the Ming Dynasty, it is only through simultaneous action that one can obtain knowledge; knowledge necessarily/automatically leads to action; knowledge means knowing how to respond to a given situation, and action is responding to a given situation. Based on the traditional Chinese eco-wisdom, Eco-translatology naturally seeks the academic unity of theory and practice, which is the primary reason for one of its three paradigmatic features—practicality (see Sect. 8.2.3).