![\"Yan](\"\/\/www.1stopbulgaria.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/yan_fu.jpg\")
Yan Fu was a Chinese scholar and translator, most famous for introducing western ideas, including Darwin\u2019s \u201cnatural selection\u201d, into the eastern world in the late 19th century.<\/p>\nYan Fu was a Chinese scholar and translator, most famous for introducing western ideas, including Darwin\u2019s \u201cnatural selection\u201d, into the eastern world in the late 19th century.<\/p>\n
On January 08, 1854, Yan Fu was born in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China. In his early years, his father greatly encouraged him to obtain high education and prepare for the Imperial examination. However, the death of his father in 1866 caused an abrupt change to these plans. A year later, Yan Fu entered the Fujian Arsenal Academy in Fuzhou, a Western school where he studied a variety of subjects including English, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, astrology, and navigation. This was a turning point in Yan Fu\u2019s life as he was able to experience the first-hand contact with Western science, thus inspiring the enthusiasm that carried him through the rest of his career.<\/p>\n
Yan stated in the introduction\u00a0of his translation of Evolution and Ethics<\/i>\u00a0that “there are three difficulties in translation: faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance”<\/em>. He did not set them as general standards for translation and did not say that they were independent of each other. However, since the publication of that work, the phrase \u201cfaithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance\u201d has been attributed to Yan Fu as a standard for any good translation and has become a clich\u00e9 in Chinese academic circles, giving rise to numerous debates and theses.<\/p>\n Yan Fu was one of the most influential scholars of his generation. He worked to introduce Western social, economic, and political ideas into the Eastern world. Previous translation efforts had been focused mainly on religion and technology.<\/p>\n In 1895 he published Zhibao<\/i> \u76f4\u5831, a Chinese newspaper founded in Tianjin by Constantin von Hannecken (1854-1925), which contains several of his most famous essays:<\/p>\nWorks and contribution<\/h2>\n