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Cross-cultural Communication Context Legge Book Of Translation

Posted on:2011-11-28Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:Z H LuFull Text:PDF
GTID:1115360305488233Subject:Ancient Chinese literature
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Between the end of the 16th century and the end of the 19th century, the Christian missionaries who had come in close succession to China played an unusual as well as indispensable role in the Sino-Western cultural communication. Their purpose of coming to China had been to preach Christianity, yet by and by their missionary work went beyong spreading religion with more of intercultural communicative nature. It is they who brough about in China the second peak of translation which, compared with the first one characterized by the large-scale translation of Buddhist scriptures, was more than a one-way transmission but an exchange and interaction between two cultures. We believe, therefore, by conducting a study, as a"spectator"and from a new perspective, of the translations done by the missionaries in that period, we will be in a favorable position to reexamine the ancient Chinese classics, and to clarify the history, the path, and the mode of intercultural communication; we shall also be able to provide positively significant evidence and a train of thought for a deepgoing probe into the traditional Chinese learning and enhancing the Sino-Western cultural communication.Taking into account the above considerations, the present dissertation aims to make an in-depth analysis of James Legge's translation of The Shoo King in terms of the communicative motive, the communicative strategies and the communicative effects, in the hope of fanning out from point to area, to offer some valuable experiments for the expansion of the study of ancient Chinese literature and the study of Confucian classics, as well as the deepening of the intercultural dissemination.The dissertation falls into five chapters.Chapter One, centering around the evolution from a missionary to a cultural disseminator, introduces James Legge (1815-1897) and his translation of the Chinese classics. It is pointed out in this chapter that in the as long as three-century intercultural communication, the western missionaries had been playing a very powerful role. In order to open the gate of the ancient Empire of China, the Jesuits, initiated by Matteo Ricci, had managed to enhance their knowledge about the Chinese culture by translating the Ruist canons in a so called"Jesus Crist + Confucius"strategy. With the progression of their missionary work, however, there appeared a turn in that strategy, i.e., a turn from the once one-sided and temporary acquisition of Confucian culture to the systematic and all-round education of Chinese culture. The Anglo-Chinese College was established as a symbol of the turn, while James Legge, while teaching there, finished his personal conversion from a reverent Christian missionary to a enthusiastic disseminator of the Chinese culture. His translation series of the Chinese Classics have ascended from a mere tranformation of linguistic signs to a transferrence of cultural signs, from an introduction of Chinese literature to an evaluation of the Chinese culture. This change was due to Legge's proficiency in the study of Confucian classics. The insightful introduction of the study of Confucian canons in the rendering, together with his overturning conclusions about The Shoo King and The Annals of the Bamboo Books, revealed his solid grounding in the knowledge of Confucian classics and his indepence in academic thinking. In his translation of The Shoo King we can hardly trace any missionary motive but find a translator, a researcher and disseminator of the Chinese learning merged into one.Chapter Two deals with the overall characteristics of Legge's rendering of The Shoo King. With meaning closest to the original, and likeness in both form and spirit, Legge's Shoo King is like a cultural facsimile, truthfully and clearly relaying the historical and cultural messages of ancient China. As cutting and then filing, as carving and the polishing, Legge strived to get rid of, in his own rendering, the surface-level transaltional infantilism common in the initial stage of ancient literature translation by making appropriate intentional interpretation in transmitting the original meaning. He was extremely careful in interpreting concepts, eludidating metaphors, and expounding implied meanings in order to achieve the maximum precision of transferrence. Meanwhile, being familiar with the truth that"What the body is to the soul what sharpness is to sword.", he made a great effort to maintain the original form in translation, thus translating songs/verses into poems, epigrams into epigrams, parallelism into paralellism, antithesis into antithesis, abbreviations into abbreviations, so on and so forth, resulting in a good preservation of the original stylistic features. What is more estimable is that, he spared no efforts in reproducing the spirit of the original. By cleverly employing archaic and formal words and expressions, and sentence patterns, he managed to reproduce the primitive and elegant flavor of the original; and by modelling the mood of the setting, imitating the tones and transplanting the feelings of the characters, he succeeded in reproducing the vivid literary style of The Shoo King. All these fully reflected Legge's faithfulness-oriented principle which, together with the distinctive characteristics of his translation, makes his version of Shoo King a classical work in the history of Sino-Western cultural communication.How had Legge's translation become a facsimile of culture? Chapters Three and Four are devised to answer this question. The key, in effect, lies in"copious annotations","explicitation", and"foreignization", the three major translational approaches as well as cultural disseminating strategies employed by Legge in his rendering of The Shoo King, which are dealt with respectively in detail in these two chapters.Chapter Three points out that in order to prevent cultural barriers from obstructing the communication, Legge adopted the"thick translation"approach to compensate the cultural default, resulting in his annotation ten times or tens of times of his translated texts. The layout was carefully arranged, with the Chinese original on the top, the English translation in the middle, and the annotations at the bottom. The contents of the annotation include"Analysis of the Title"and"Interpretation with the Text". Many of the annotaions have the exegetic nature. For instance, complete and explicit explanations are given to words with unusual pronunciation, sentences in peculiar structure, and characters or words with primary or extended meanings, etc. However, a much larger part of the annotation is covered by the critical introduction and elaborated interpretation of the Chinese culture.Obviously, the purpose of doing so was to compensate the cultural default. Thanks to his familiarity with the cultural background and pragmatic presuppositions on both sides, Legge was highly sensitive to any textual semantic deviation in the SL texts. Whenever a"cultural default"was detected, he would duely supply the target readers with detailed notes to fill the potential"vacuum of sense". While a common practice today,"transaltion compensation"was a great invention in the 19th century. The"textual interpretation"and the"cultural commentary"combined perfectly in Legge's rendition of Shoo King. Consequently, the translated text is"thickened"by the detailed annotation, while the"thickened"version gets, in turn,"incremented"in value. Legge's rendition of Shoo King has not only created a new system for the translation of the Confucian classics, but also enriched the cultural hermeneutic modes in intercultural communication.In the process of the rendering, Legge kept both his readers and the original work in mind, and employed two methods accordingly. One was"explicitation", namely, to make the target language idiomatic and to bring out the originally obscure or veiled meaning without any reduction of accuracy. The other is"foreignization", that is, to maximumly reproduce the special linguistic and cultural flavor of the original work. He made flexible use of the methods transliteration, literal translation, and transliteration plus free translation, tactfully maticulating the culture-loaded words, which are mostly concise in form but rich in meaning, or which, through historical and cultural acuumulation, reflect the unique Han nationality's living situations, religions, and values, but which generally have no equivalents in other languages. Realizing the objectively existing untranslatability, Legge took great trouble to resort to the"foreignization"approach to maximumly reproduce the unique linguistic and cultural features of the original. While the"foreignization"approach was likely to bring the readers"sense of strangeness", they highlighted the information of the Chinese culture, and would better undertake the role of disseminating culture. The two approaches -"explicitation"and"foreignization"- judging from the intercultural communication perspective, are in effect, a"double decoding"of culture.Chapter Five is an analysis of the impact of Legge's translation on intercultural communication and the necessity of continual retranslation of classical works. Since the double-decoding process involves an informational convertion between different cultural signs, and a dialogue and an interaction between different cultures, its two-way and overlapping nature proves that translation is by no means a matter that can be settled once and for all. On the contrary, translation must follow the cirulating rule of"influence—critical reflection—retranslation"for further development.Legge's Chinese Classics have caused great sensation in the West ever since their first publication, which, for a long time, have been acclaimed as perfect translation in the western sinological circles. Owing to the limitations of the times and cultures, those reviews cannot be taken as the criterion for evaluating Legge's translation of the Confucian classics. But one thing is undeniable that Legge's Chinese Classics, because of the translator's profound knowledge about Chinese culture and his consummate skills in translation, have become the classical prototype since their birth, and have played a pivotal role in the sinological development in Europe.However, the fact that Legge's rendering of Confucian classics still remains"the standard rendition"till today makes us feel both gratified and worried. We are gratified because Legge's efforts have made a great contribution in disseminating Chinese culture to the outside world; we feel worried because we have not yet made any surmounting achievement so far.With the advancement of learning and the devolopment of researches, some defects have revealed, and will too, themselves in Legge's rendition. There are objective as well as subjective causes for those defects. Nevertheless, those defects will never devalue Legge's rendition, but rather, serve as a reminder to us that just as no gold is pure, so no translation is perfect; classical works always call for reproduction, high quality reproduction to meet the sustainable requirement of intercultural communication, and to keep pace with the times. Legge's success, as well as his failure, will always be a great treasure for us. His pioneer work and meritorious deeds will never be obliterated.
Keywords/Search Tags:James Legge, the rendition of The Shoo King, cultural communication
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