Chinese Translations Of The Bible In Polysystem

Chinese translations of the Bible were initially produced during the Tang Dynasty, and were further developed in the Ming and Qing Dynasties; today the time is ripe for a new translation. In this thesis, the author will review the thousand-year history of Biblical translation in China, analyze the characteristics and rules of these various translations, and attempt to explain the reasons for all special phenomena. The Bible is a religious book written for Christians, so the characteristics of religious translation can be found throughout Bible translation history. For example, translators would respect the source text and inject no personal perception of their own. But nowadays, subjectivity has grown in methods of Biblical translation and dynamic equivalence has gradually been utilized; there are even some literati that treat the Bible as a purely literary work and are trying to translate it from a literary point-of-view. Biblical translation in China has its own characteristics because of the particular situation in China; different translation strategies are applied during the translation process and different translators have their own intentions in their work of translation. Research has mainly been done to compare different versions of the Bible and conclude which version is more faithful or more elegant than others. However, this thesis will jump out of that frame and explain the phenomena with Descriptive Translation Theory, especially the three concepts in the Polysystem Theory: patronage, poetics and ideology.The Polysystem Theory belongs to the Cultranslation Theory, which was introduced in the 1970s: this theory connects translation with the many elements that affect the production of a translation work. These elements include the cultural environment of source and target languages, social and political environment, etc. This theory has greatly broadened the field of translation study.The main body of the thesis contains three chapters:...