The Heterogeneity Of Classical Chinese And Its Effects On Classical Chinese Literary Translation And Research

Translation Studies, featuring a comprehensive nature, is both a science and an art. It needs linguistics and other disciplines to make it scientific. The establishment of scientific views on language would enable the Translation Studies in China to be built on linguistic science and the factual basis of Chinese language and translation. In the linguistic field there are two major trends for research: one is based on homogeneity, which holds that all the languages are ontologically the same (including language essence, constitutes, systems, structures and language function); the other is on heterogeneity, which focuses on the comparison or contrast between one specific language and other languages in terms of language essence, constitutes, systems and functions. As to translation studies, it is more valuable to study the heterogeneity of a specific source language and target language on the basis of recognition of the homogeneity of languages. This paper is an attempt to make a heterogeneous study of how from the source target of the classical Chinese fiction Liao Chai Chih I is translated into different target texts in modern English, and to further its lexical study of classical Chinese and modern English in terms of system, structure, and function, and its comparative study of the contexts governing semantic meaning and lexical meaning discrimination.