Chapter 1 Introduction
The theme of the International Translation Day (ITD) of 2011 is “Translation as Intercultural Communication”, and the International Federation of Translators (Federation International des Traducteurs--FIT) published an article with this title on its official website, mentioning that “We in FIT are committed to supporting the translators, interpreters, and terminologists around the world working to bring greater intercultural understanding through their professional efforts.” The article specially mentioned that FIT will support the terminologists to facilitate the intercultural communication. Terms and its standardization will profoundly promote the exchange both in academic and culture, and translation has always been playing an important role in intercultural communication.
1.1 Basic Concept of Calligraphy
“shufa” is the Chinese version of calligraphy. According to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, calligraphy means “the art of producing beautiful writing using special pens or brushes, or the writings produced this way”.(Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). And Merriam-Webster online defines calligraphy as “a: artistic, stylized, or elegant handwriting or lettering; b: the art of producing such writing”. The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary describes “书法” as “the art of writing words, especially denotes to the art of writing Chinese character with a writing brush (2002, translated).
1.2 Brief History of Chinese Calligraphy
Chinese calligraphy has always playing an important role in Chinese people’s life in the very beginning of the characters. The characters are the symbols recording the language, and at the same time is the instrument to interchange thoughts. The originating of characters marked the time when the society went into a civilized period. The earliest characters in China are the oracles, inscription on bones or tortoise shells of the Shang Dynasty. People of that time inscribed the characters into the tortoise shells to record the history or to practice divination. This was the period when calligraphy was on its budding stage. The characters on the shells not only expressed certain meanings it meant to convey, but also demonstrated its unique beauty. Later on, the Chinese Bronze Inscription appeared. The Shang Dynasty and the Zhou Dynasty were the age when the bronze wares quickly developed to a peak. So this kind of characters was also called Bronze Character. It is more coarse than the oracles, which is much fine. This kind of character was followed by stone-drum inscriptions, meaning the inscriptions on drum-shaped stone blocks. To this point, the number of characters was becoming larger and larger, forming a relative uniform style, the writing of which also paid much attention to the esthetics of the characters. These characters gradually evolved into Large Seal Script, which was updated into Small Seal Script after the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty, Qin Shi Huang. Then clerical script developed on the basis of Small Seal Script. The clerical script
