A Descriptive Study Of The Two English Versions Of Tao Te Ching

Tao Te Ching is the first complete philosophical book in the Chinese history. The dissemination of its thought has profound influence on the whole Chinese nation, including philosophical and religious aspects and its secular application to everyday life. Since the first English version translated by John Chalmers appeared in 1868, it has received a wide spread attention in the world, especially has had widespread influence on the Anglo-American countries. Until now, there are over 100 English versions of Tao Te Ching at home and abroad. There are so many translated versions of Tao Te Ching that it has become the works with the most versions except Holy Bible in the world. Among the English versions of Tao Te Ching, there are some versions that are well received, such as Arthur Waley's translation has been reprinted for many times. However, in the recent 20 years, new translation productions still appeared by almost one version a year, which makes the author of this thesis be interested in this phenomenon and decide to make a research on it.In the 1950's, the translation study paradigm transformed from prescriptive study to descriptive study, which is very significant in the history of translation studies. The traditional prescriptive studies stresses comparing texts, tries hard to explore the language transform rules, and judges the quality of the translation in order to provide instructions for the translation practice. While the descriptive translation studies breaks through the limitation of the pure text, treating translation as a kind of cultural and historical phenomenon. Its purpose lies not in formulating standard and making value judgment but in describing objectively the actual transnational phenomenon.The thesis consists of four chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion.The introduction briefly reviews the status quo of studies on the translation of Tao Te Ching, and points out that it is necessary to carry out further exploration of the reason that the translation of Tao Te Ching coming out unceasingly from the perspective of descriptive translation studies.Chapter one gives a general introduction to Laotse and Tao Te Ching, including the influence, the translation, the themes and key concepts, the style, and the versions and commentaries of Tao Te Ching'.Chapter two is dedicated to the study of the diversifying interpretations of Tao Te Ching from the perspective of the text, semantic, syntactic, and ideological interpretations of Tao Te Ching.Chapter three introduces the descriptive translation study, and the two main holders of this theory- James Holmes' map of Translation Studies and Gideon Toury's program for Translation Studies.Chapter four first introduces the two translators concerned in this thesis-James Legge and Lin Yutang, then studies the two selected English versions of Tao Te Ching from the perspective of Hermeneutics, Skopos Theory, and translator's Subjectivity.The last part makes a conclusion that according to the research of the above facts it is inevitable that the Chinese Classics Tao Te Ching is translated again and again in the translation history.