Translation of Han dynasty titles

The Dubs school of title translation has the longest pedigree of any schema for title translation and has broad acceptance in the scholarly community, but it was not built on any unifying principles[3] and changed erratically during Dubs's lifetime.[4] It is now mainly represented by the works of Bielenstein, de Crespigny, and Dull, all of whom made their own minor alterations while trying to remain mostly in the Dubs framework.

Wang Yuquan's 1949 article, although based entirely on primary source materials, seems to draw inspiration for translation of titles from Dubs in places,[5] and can be considered to be completely superseded by later works. It was a source for Bielenstein, who called it "out of date".[6] Bielenstein remains the academic standard which all others attempt to improve but compare themselves against for context. Dull's work, unpublished until it was released freely on the web in 2010, has been ignored by academia. De Crespigny has gone further outside the Dubs mold than the other authors.

In a 1971 review of de Crespigny's 1969 translation of part of the Zizhi Tongjian, Han dynasty specialist Anthony Hulsewé impugned the renderings of Chinese official titles, which then much more closely followed Dubs, as "barbarized" and "abhorrent".[7]

Hucker's system has, in the main, not been adopted by the scholarly community. Its strengths are that it was created with a goal of systematisation and universality, and built upon sound principles of translation: that the rendering should ideally convey both the sense of the responsibilities of the office and the literal Chinese meaning, that it should avoid too-familiar Western analogues likely to create false impressions, and that it should not rely on bizarre-sounding neologisms.[8] Hucker drew from a great deal of references during his research, including the work of Bielenstein, and received input from a large number of Chinese scholars, including de Crespigny and Dull.[9]

In An Outline of the Civil Administration of the Later Han Empire, Rafe de Crespigny rejects outright Hucker's system, claiming he found Hucker's renderings to be unreliable and unacceptable for the Han period.[10]

The titles adopted by Loewe in his Biographical Dictionary largely follow the translations as they appeared in The Cambridge History of China, volume 1 (1987), which Loewe helped to edit. He shies away from more literal translations, opting instead for renderings which "indicate an official's responsibilities, or his place in the organs of government, where possible in immediately meaningful terms; and in so far as imperial offices were organised in a hierarchical basis, it has been thought advisable to choose terms which convey an official's degree of seniority."[11] Loewe appends a table comparing the renderings he adopts to those used by "Dubs, Bielenstein, and de Crespigny",[12] acknowledging their grouping as a single school and that school's sinological primacy.

• Bielenstein, Hans (1980). The Bureaucracy of Han Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-22510-6.
• de Crespigny, Rafe (1967). Official Titles of the Former Han Dynasty as Translated and Transcribed by H.H. Dubs. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
• de Crespigny, Rafe (2007). A Biographical Dictionary of Later Han to the Three Kingdoms (23 – 220 AD). Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-15605-0.
• de Crespigny, Rafe (2007), An Outline of the Civil Administration of the Later Han Empire, Australia National University, archived from the original on September 3, 2007
• de Crespigny, Rafe (2007), An Outline of the Military Organisation of the Later Han Empire, Australia National University, archived from the original on September 3, 2007
• Dubs, Homer H. (1938). The History of the Former Han Dynasty. Baltimore: Waverly Press.
• Dull, Jack L. (2006), Official Titles of the Han Dynasty: A Tentative List (PDF), University of Washington, archived from the original (PDF) on July 1, 2018
• Hucker, Charles O. (1985). Dictionary of Official Titles of Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Hulsewé, A.F.P. (1971). "review of Rafe de Crespigny's The Last of the Han, 1969". T'oung Pao. Brill. 57 (1): 168–171.
• Loewe, Michael (2000). A Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han, and Xin Periods (221 BC – AD 24). Leiden: Brill. ISBN 90-04-10364-3.
• Mayers, William Frederick (1878). The Chinese Government: A Manual of Chinese Titles. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press.
• Wang Yuquan (June 1949). "An outline of the central government of the Former Han Dynasty". Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Harvard–Yenching Institute. 12 (1/2): 134–187. doi:10.2307/2718206. JSTOR 2718206.