A Contrastive Study Of Three English Versions Of Tao Te Ching From The Hermeneutic Perspective

Tao Te Ching, a repository of ancient Chinese wisdom, is very concise inlanguage and profound in meaning. Despite its length of only five thousand words, itspoetic language has illustrated vast philosophical and dialectical thoughts, receivinggreat attention from scholars all over the world. Moreover, its translated versions arealso in great number, second only to the Bible. So, the research on the translatedversions of Tao Te Ching is always a hot topic. The writer of this thesis also selectsthree typical English versions of this work respectively from the angles of the author,the text and the reader, trying to make a contrastive research on the three Englishversions from the perspective of hermeneutics.Hermeneutics is the theory about understanding and interpretation, which inessence has something in common with translation studies. Along the course of itsdevelopment from the traditional period to the contemporary period, hermeneutics hasexperienced a focus-shifting process from the author to the text, and then to the reader.Meanwhile, these three factors of the author, the text and the reader are also threefundamental elements which the translators have to take into consideration intranslating process. The translators with different focuses will produce differentversions even of the same work, which provides a new horizon of translation studies.Therefore, in this thesis the writer will select three typical English versions of Tao TeChing translated by Gu Zhengkun, Xu Yuanchong and R. B. Blakney and make acontrastive study of the three English versions from the perspective of hermeneutics toillustrate how the three elements of the author, the text and the reader affect thetranslating process of Tao Te Ching and in a broader sense to explore the principles,techniques and standardization issues in the translation of the Chinese classics. Based on the contrastive analysis of the three versions of Tao Te Ching, the thesiscomes to the following conclusion: as time goes by, both the translator and the readerwill change in their standards of aesthetic values and even in their language. On theone hand, only by taking part in the reading process of the translator, who is alsoregarded as its reader, can the original text acquire the specific and understandablemeaning. On the other hand, in order to make their translation more acceptable to thetarget reader, the translator always copes with the text according to a specifictranslation task in a certain time and the demands of the target readers. Therefore, thetranslation of the Chinese classics should take the influences of the author, the text andthe reader into account, and it is the translator’s task to adopt appropriate translationstrategies, on the basis of their translation orientations, to make their versions cater fordifferent demands of different target readers, which can bring about more translatedversions that bring the reader closer to the original text or the original text closer to thereader.