A Comparative Study On Two English Versions Of Tao Te Ching From The Perspective Of Eco- Translatology

Lao Zi is the founder of the Taoism,whose philosophical work Tao Te Ching has not only been widely circulated in China,but also has enjoyed a great reputation in the whole world.Although a great deal of research has been conducted in a comparative study of the translations of Tao Te Ching,there is a current dearth of research on the translations from the perspective of eco-translatology in this decade.The main purpose of the study is to comparatively analyze the two English versions by the English scholar Arthur Waley in 1937 and the Chinese translator Xu Yuanchong in 2018 based on 23 examples,focusing on their respective adaptation and selection in the translation process based on the theory of Eco-translatology.Eco-translatology was first proposed by Hu Gengshen,a professor of Tsinghua University in 2001,in which he believes that translation is “translators’ selective activity to adapt to the translational eco-environment,which concerns a world where the source text,the source language and the target language are presented,namely,an entirety with language,communication,culture,society,as well as authors,readers,and clients connected with each other.The process of translation is the constant circulation between adaptive selection and selective adaptation.Based on the theory of Ecotranslatology,this thesis selects two English versions of Tao Te Ching by Waley and Xu in different regions and different ages,which are analyzed comparatively by employing “Adaptation and Selection”,“Three-Dimensional Transformations”,etc.from Ecotranslatology.This thesis comprises five chapters.The first chapter explains the research background,significance and methodology as well as the layout of the thesis.The second chapter gives a brief introduction to Lao Zi and Tao Te Ching,as well as presents previous studies on English versions of Tao Te Ching and Eco-translatology at home and abroad.The third chapter articulates a detailed explanation of the theory of Ecotranslatology,as well as the method of three-dimensional transformations.The fourth chapter constitutes a comparative study on both English versions of Tao Te Ching in three dimensions based on the theory of Eco-translatology,which can be further subdivided into three parts: firstly,the author explains the reasons for choosing two translators and gives a brief introduction to the two translators and their translations;secondly,the author analyzes both translators’ selective adaptation to the translational eco-environment from the perspective of the original text and the translators themselves;finally,examples are given to perform a comparative study on Waley’s and Xu’s adaptive selection of the target texts from the linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions.In the last chapter,the comparative analyses performed on the 23 examples of the source text and both translators’ translations reveal that Waley’s and Xu’s translations respectively make adaptive selections and selective adaptation,mainly from the linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions with diverse understandings from their own points of view,which make a difference to their translation quality.The study indicates that there is no real sense of superiority and inferiority in term of the translation activity,because of different translational ecoenvironment.