穆時英一九三三年的小說〈被當作消遣品的男子〉，用了許多科學術語。醫學和心理學辭彙，例如「女性嫌惡症」、「解剖」、「神經衰弱」、「消化不良」、「病菌」等等，充斥全篇。這些辭彙轉借自日文翻譯西方科學的術語，作者輕佻地運用這些辭彙，嘲弄敘事者爲追求摩登女郎而神魂顛倒，展現出新感覺派作品的一貫作風。這些轉借字不僅促成中國現代文學辭彙的蛻變，也轉化了我們的日常語言－例如日常會話、報紙、教科書等等－制約了我們了解自己和他人身體與心理的模式。
本文將追溯心理學如何進入日本與中國，並以幾個關鍵辭彙的翻譯爲例，說明我們是透過翻譯，而學習如何爲五官感受和心理疾病命名。如眾所皆知，晚清以來盛行「東亞病夫」的說法。二、三○年代的作家是在告訴我們：如今使國人深受其苦的是「心的疾病」。結論將進一步說明，連今天我們對彼此示愛的「我愛你」一詞，也是現代的發明，受到基督教翻譯《聖經》和日文轉借字的影響。在理論上，本文探討翻譯過程中，知識／權力與譯者的能動性、創造性的關係：在文化翻譯的過程中，面對各種「體制實踐」的交會－如儒學、佛學、傳統醫學與西學的交會－譯者如何「取捨折衷」（井上哲次郎語），透過「個人自由抉擇」來跨越體制實踐的界限，進而創新。本文指出，「心的疾病」的旅行過程，讓我們理解到，國家、語言的界限，無從阻礙概念、語彙的全球性流動；此過程中，文化翻譯者的能動性是跨文化現代性的推手；跨文化的場域是他們施展創造性轉化的空間。

In Mu Shiying’s 1933 story “Bei dangzuo xiaoqianpin de nanzi” (“A Man Taken as a Plaything”), medical and psychological terms such as “misogyny,” “autopsy,” “neurasthenia,” “indigestion,” and “germ” abound. Typical of Neo- Sensation stories, these terms, borrowed from Japanese translations of the Western scientific lexicon, are used in a flippant fashion to ridicule a fickle modern girl who enjoys torturing her suitors. My ultimate goal is to indicate that loanwords from modern Japanese scientific terminology transformed not only the lexicon of modern Chinese literature, but also that of our everyday language—in speech, newspapers, textbooks, and so on—conditioning the way we understand our own bodies and minds as well as others’.
This article first traces the introduction of psychology as a discipline in Japan and China, using the translation of a few key terms as examples to demonstrate that it is through translation that we learn to name our perceptions and mental illnesses. After the discourse of the “Sick Man of East Asia” (dongya bingfu), prevalent in China since the late Qing, writers in the 1 920s and 1 930s were telling us that Chinese were now suffering from the “malady of the heart.” In the conclusion I will show that even the term “I love you” is also a modern invention, influenced by the translation of Christian scriptures and Japanese loanwords.
This article investigates the relationships between knowledge/power and the translator’s agency and creativity. During the process of cultural translation, facing the interactions of different institutional practices—Confucianism, Buddhism, traditional medicine and Western medical science—how does the translator practice the art of “selection, deletion, and compromise” (Inoeu tetsujirō)? It is through “individual free choice” that the translator manages to cross the boundaries of institutional practices in order to create. The article aims to point out that the traveling process of “the malady of the heart” shows that the boundaries between nations and languages are unable to block the global circulation of new terms and concepts. During this process the translators’ agency is the propeller of transcultural modernity; the transcultural site is the space where the translators exercise transcultural transformation.