Onomastic Lexica Translation via Phonetic Adaptation in Ruggieri’s Work
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48075/odal.v7i1.36000Keywords:
Portuguese Chinese translation, religious terms, cultural adaptation, Jesuits in China, Chinese charactersAbstract
This study analyzes the translation of Christian onomastics between Portuguese and Mandarin in the 16th century, with a particular focus on the works of Michele Ruggieri (1552-1610). After establishing a Portuguese colonial hub in Macau, the Jesuits, led by Alessandro Valignano, implemented a cultural adaptation policy. As a result, learning Chinese and adapting Portuguese words primarily relied on semantic borrowings, while phonetic adaptations were relatively uncommon (Zhu & Araujo, 2025b). However, Ruggieri’s works incorporate some phonetic adaptations, especially regarding Christian onom astica. This article investigates how these names were adapted, considering whether the choice of Chinese characters was guided by phonetic similarity, semantic meaning, or visual aesthetics. In employing a comparative-descriptive methodology, the analysis highlights both phonological and semantic characteristics of the names (Calabrese & Wetzels, 2009). It reveals that, following the tradition established in China with the introduction of Buddhism, Ruggieri uses Chinese characters as syllabic representations rather than strictly adhering to their traditional logographic functions. In some cases, however, partial semantic adaptation is intricately tied to phonetic elements, reflecting the complexity of the cultural adaptation process. This study sheds light on the challenges of dealing with Christian onomastics in languages that do not use alphabetic scripts (cf. Jatobá, 2025)
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