A Study On English Translations Of Chuci

Holism of Cultural Anthropology is an important disciplinary category with its theoretical thrusts emphasizing the holistic awareness of things and that of human as well, as cultural subjects. It mainly includes three key ideas:First, the overall characteristic of a culture is not simply equivalent to the sum of its partial traits for various cultural facts are internally integrated. Second, it concerns the inheritance of national culture and the ways to passing on its history and culture to the next generation and foreign community. Third, it values subjective human, their subjectivity as well as the interactive relationship between human and various cultures they carry.Focusing on the culture of Chuci English translations, this dissertation mainly explores the following questions from the perspective of holism in Cultural Anthropology:What is historical status and future trend of Chuci English translations? What overall cultural outlook does different English translation of Chuci present? Whether has the multi-disciplinary and multi-level cultural value of the source text been explored and transmitted, and its continued life acquired an assurance of survival? What enlightments does the study give to the translations of other Chinese classics?The dissertation consists of three parts. Part One starts with an introductory overview of the significance and impact of Chuci, followed by a description of the purpose, significance, content, approaches and originality of the research. Part Two is the highlight of the study, which comprises five chapters. The first chapter reviews Chuci English translation and its related research both at home and abroad, finding that the exiting English translations of Chuci are limited in terms of the range of texts, translation perspectives, translation purposes and approaches, there has been a lack of necessary correlation and interaction between different translated versions. Previous research findings of English translations are sporadic essays lack of more integrated and comprehensive demonstrations with quite little research into the question whether the translations highlight the overall cultural value of the source text. Therefore, the chapter proposes that holism of Cultural Anthropology, as an interdisciplinary theory, can be employed to study the translation of human cultural factors in Chuci.Chapter Two makes a theoretical interpretation of Cultural Anthropology as a special form of cultural poetics whose core concepts like holism, universalism, cross-cultural comparism, are characterized by mutual elucidation with translation. Its primary principle, holism, and some conceptions derived from it such as emic and etic, history and reality, integration and vicissitudes, thick description, subjectivity, etc. enable translators to keep a holistic horizon and avoid one-sided understanding of translation subject and object because of the mutual interpretation relationship between holism and translation research. Therefore, Chuci translation can rely on the theories to acquire further illustration. The chapter analyzes the holistic cultural features of Chuci, and further depicts a preliminary conception of the approaches to realize the holistic English translations of Chuci. Chapter Three focuses on the overall features of four Chuci English translations. The following four English translation versions generated at different times and cultural backgrounds are explored in terms of their holistic cultural features, translators’host culture:Author Waley’s The Nine Songs:A Study of Shamanism in ancient China, David Hawks’Ch’u Tz’u:the Songs of the South, an Ancient Chinese Anthology, Lim Boon Keng’s The Li Sao, An Elegy on Encountering Sorrows by Chu Yuan, and Sun Dayu’s Selected Poems of Quyuan,which results in a speculation on translators’cultural identity, interpretation perspective, and construction of holistic mode of Chuci translations.Chapter Four examines the cases of translating the human cultural system inherent in Chuci to discover and evaluate its translating strategies. With an inspection about whether the cultural values of its surface technical system, middle-level social system and deep-level ideological system are accurately interpreted by translators, the chapter proposes that a multi-dimensional interpretation is offered for the former, for the intermediate, a holistic multiple fusion of historical, cultural, and functional horizons would be a good option, and for the latter, it is advisable to seek connections between connotations of Chinese and western cultural factors to meet their inter-centrality. On this basis, this chapter further notes that emphasis should be put on the exploration of the rich and precious multi-disciplinary value of the source text.Chapter Five approaches the inspirations that the study offers to the development of classics translation theories. It points out those classics translation from the perspective of culture holism is a refractring from culture ontology of the works to humans, the subject of culture, which in essence means the exchange and sharing of cultural resources, and also a platform for dialogues between translation subjects. Afterwards, the chapter puts forward that configurative culture is the mainstay of translator culture and demonstrates the positive influence of three-dimensional holistic interpretation perspectives of "Stand back" and Cultural acculturation strategy on classics translation.The last part, as a conclusion, reviews the main content of the study and reflects on some issues relevant to the theories and methods of classics translation, points out the inadequacies of the present study and the research orientation for further study.