A Contrastive Study Of James Legge’s And Lin Yutang’s Strategies For Translating Dao De Jing:A Perspective Of Poly-System Theory

Dao De Jing has all along been regarded as the most influential work on Taoism ever since its founder, Lao Tzu, who lived over two thousand years ago. As the first complete philosophical work and the most authoritative classic symbol of the Taoist, it condenses the traditional Chinese ideas of Taoist culture. With so extensive, profound and obscure meaning, the work is quite difficult to comprehend and leads to a far reaching impact around the world. And as a classic popular both home and abroad, it has become one of the most frequently translated works in the world, among which Legge’s The Sacred Books of the East-- The Chinese Classics: the texts of Taoism and Lin Yutang’s The Wisdom of Lao Tzu are two representative English versions.This thesis makes a contrastive study of the above two translations from the perspective of the poly-system theory. First, Legge’s and Lin’s strategies adopted in the process of translation are explored, and then some main factors which resulted in their different translation strategies are analyzed.Through a contrastive study, this thesis finds out that, as the two representative English translators of Dao De Jing, Legge and Lin adopted quite different strategies in translating because of their different cultural identities. James Legge, as a sinologist from the British poly-system, was greatly influenced by the Christian culture, especially by the doctrine and linguistic style of Bible. Therefore, he mainly adopted the domestication strategy in his translation by means of using the prosaic biblical language and Christian cultural images, and replacing Taoist images with a strong taste of Christianity. On the contrary, Lin Yutang, as a scholar-translator born in the Chinese poly-system, was deeply cultivated by the Chinese traditional culture. Thus, he mainly adopted foreignization strategy in his translation. With a fundamental objective of transmitting Chinese traditional culture faithfully into English, he in a whole used the poetic worldly language closer to the Chinese classic feature and reproduced and imitated the Taoist images to the greatest extent so that his English readers may feel the original taste of Dao De Jing in reading his translation more.Seen from the prospective of poly-system theory, classics translation is not only a simple shift between two languages but also a deep communication of cultural information inseparable from the social cultural backgr ound in which the translation occurs. The two English translations of Dao De Jing distinctively reflect the far-reaching influence of the poly-system on classics translation. The two translators, influenced respectively by their different poly-systems, different translation purposes and propositions on translation criteria, adjusted their translation strategies in a proper way, which brought into their versions different traces of their poly-systems and led to different linguistic styles.