A Comparative Study Of Two English Versions Of Shi Jing From The Perspective Of Culture Reappearance

The ancient Chinese classical poetries are the great treasures of traditional Chinese literature. Shi Jing is the most precious one. After thousands of years’ cultural accumulation at home, it spread in Japan in the first half of the5th century, then was introduced to Western Europe in the period of Ming and Qing Dynasty. From the beginning of the19th century, it started to spread in America. Thus more and more people could appreciate it in their own languages. During the long and tortuous process of Shi Jing’s propagation abroad, its translation version became more diversified, and its translation became more and more delicate. However, the appearance of Shi Jing’s translation at home was relatively later and the quantity was less.The research object of this thesis is the English versions of Shi Jing, so a relatively typical version will be chosen from the various English versions in Europe and America. The first one who translated Shi Jing into English completely was an English missionary and sinologist James Legge. His The She King will be chosen as an example among the abroad translation versions. Book of Poetry translated by Xu Yuanchong was also the first complete one in China. So it will also be chosen.There are a lot of theses on Shi Jing and its English translation, but most of them are from the perspectives such as reception aesthetics, translator’s subjectivity and translation ecological environment and so on. This thesis will study Shi Jing from the perspective of culture, and use the theory of "culture reappearance" from Professor Bai Jingyu’s Culture and Translation. Culture reappearance is a comparatively new theory and there are not so many relevant materials or practical analyses. Professor Bai Jingyu put forward the translation theory of culture reappearance from the point of cross-cultural communication. In his opinion, culture reappearance means reappearing the original culture features first and then reappearing the original cultural information. In general, the translation theory of culture reappearance embodies the nature and task of translation. The real object of translation is reappearing original culture through Interlingua transformation. Its essence is the communication of cultural information. Only the reappearance of original cultural information, the translation can really mean something. This thesis will start from the perspective of culture reappearance, and make a comparative study of two different English versions of Shi Jing, one is from James Legge, and the other is from Xu Yuanchong. Its analysis will be the different translations of the two versions on the images such as color words (red, yellow, white and so on), animals (fish, and deer and so on), plants (vines, flowers and grasses, and so on), clothes (xiang fu, di yi and so on). The thesis will discuss which version is better on the reappearance of original culture.At last, this thesis will discuss the cause of these differences from the research results. According to the research, it is easy to find two translators, who have different nationalities, cultural backgrounds, translation objects and translation strategies, will have different translations.By summarizing the two versions of English translation of Shi Jing, it could be found that James Legge, as an English missionary, translated Chinese classics in order to propagate the dogma of Christ better. He did not pay attention to the poetic value of original work so he translated without rhyme and mainly used literal translation and phonetic translation in his work. However, as an important translator in Chinese literary circle, Xu Yuanchong aimed to spread Chinese culture and literature abroad and make foreign readers appreciate Chinese culture. So he translated Shi Jing with rhyme, free translation and amplification in order to preserve the beauty in rhyme and the beauty in form of the original poetry as far as possible. He also tried his best to reappear the cultural meaning of original text. It could be found that Xu Yuanchong’s translation version is better at reappearing original cultural information and realizing the object of cultural information communication.