Pushing hands, the invisible hand, and the changing (pre-)faces of the first baihua Chinese translation of The wealth of nations

In Translation Studies (TS), theories about translation have traditionally been flooded with dichotomous categorizations: word-for-word versus sense-for-sense translation; faithful versus unfaithful translation; domestication versus foreignization. Though they are conceptually easy to understand and pedagogically convenient to use, these pairs of either/or concepts also tend to assume that translation is static and context-free. Tymoeko criticizes the dichotomy of domesticating/foreignizing as "a kind of absolute or universal standard of evaluation, with a sort of on/off quality rather than a sliding scale." In fact, researchers are usually tempted "to reduce a vast and extremely heterogeneous body of scholarship to a set of idealised tenets". but translatorial actions and phenomena in the real world are far more complex. The study of translation history, which involves translation produced decades ago, is even more so.