A Study Of The English Translation Of The Four Books By Protestant Missionary David Collie

It has been more than4hundred years since the Latin version of The Great Learning by Michiel Ruggier was published in Europe, during which many translated versions of The Four Books, the Chinese Classical Works, appeared from Latin versions of Jesuit missionaries to those of Protestant missionaries and Sinologists. Up to now, its translation is still in the progress. This kind of massively sustensive collision and dialogue between Confucianism and christianity since the end of the Ming Dynasty marked the beginning of the Sino-West cultural communications. Since then, the Confucianism embodied in The Four Books has been understood and utilized by the west.Among many translations of The Four Books, the most eye-catching are accordingly the Latin version, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, by Philippe Couplet and other Jesuit missionaries, and The English translation of the Chinese Classics by James Legge, a missionary sinologist. The former, as a top-level work of the accommodation policy advocated by Matteo Ricci, is a collective achievement from more than ten famous European Jesuits and several Chinese collaborators, which had a great influence on both European Enlightment and French Revolution. The latter, as a model of the academic translation, made a great contribution for the spread of the Confucianism to the west. However, on the road of the spread of Confucianism to the west, other translations also played a role, regretfully they did not get our due attention.The first complete English translation of The Four Books," The Chinese Classical Works, Commonly Called The Four Books, Translated and Illustrated With Notes" finished about between1825-1826, and published in1828by The Mission Press at Malacca, ended the history without the complete English version in the western world. From the perspective of the translation history of the Chinese Classics, the version of The Four Books by David Collie, in a sense, initiated the translation of the Chinese Classics by James Legge, made James Legge avoid Collie’s mistakes, and transmitted the Confucian thoughts to the west. What’s more, it had a great influence on transcendentalist representatives such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. However, this version has not been studied well.This dissertation carries out a comprehensive research on David Collie and his translation of the Four Books as an important case in the history of overseas Sinology, undertaking the view of cross-cultural research. That is to say, by way of the combination of the translator and his version, it studies the translation with mutiple points of view in the historical context, also with a reasonable evaluation about the version.The first chapter, The Introduction, states the reasons underlying the choice of this subject as my focus of research, its academic values, research design and methods. It also reviews the translation process of The Four Books to the west and the present research on Collie’s version, and sums up creative points and difficulties of this dissertation.Chapter two, The Life of David Collie, on the basis of the first-hand materials from LMS files and the Old Parish Registers of the Scotlandspeople’s Center and so on, mainly proves his birthdate and explores his activities in Malacca, including his teaching,preaching,writing, etc., in order to have a better understanding of him and restore his activities in Malacca.Chapter three, The Introduction to the version of David Collie, firstly verifies Zhu Xi’s version named Si Shu Zhangju Jizhu used by Collie as the master copy when translating The Four Books from two aspects-within and without the text; then explores the formation time of Collie’s version, its publishing process, and his Chinese assistants’function; lastly analyses structural features of his version and other missionaries’versions, at the same time, points out the close relation between the structural features and their translation motives.Chapter four, The Summary of By-text, firstly has an account of the preface, the life of Confucius, the life of Mencius from which we can know the translated process of The Four Books, Collie’s translation motives and his views about The Four Books, Confucius and Mencius; then analyses the more than600footnotes by categorizing them into two types: the former contributes to understanding the meaning of the text, the latter mainly serves to spread Christian Gospels and convert the Chinese students in Anglo-Chinese College to Christianity.Chapter five, Studies on the Text, as a main body of this dissertation, is composed of two parts:the first is about its translation methods, mainly involving phonetic translation, free translation,literal translation,addition translation; the second is the text analysis. Firstly, the Sino-west traditional translation theories, such as Xin Da Ya and semantic translation, are adoped to explore whether the text faithfully conveys the original meanings of the source text and reproduces the original style in the translation in the light of massive examples from Collie’s version; then, from the perspectives of philosophical hermeneutics and Christianity-centered view, some culture-loaded words and the Christian ideology embodied in the text and the footnotes are studied. The author expresses his understanding of the misunderstanding caused by Collie’s pre-understanding but criticizes his extraprotestantism.Chapter six, On the Influence of the Version, explores the influence of Collie’s version on James Legge, S.Wells Williams, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau with a method of philology, and argues that some Confucian thoughts on human nature, virtues, self-cultivating etc. were utilized very well by Emerson and Thoreau, which, on the one hand, satisfies the need of the transcendentalism’s development, and on the other hand, manifests the cultural values and charm of Confucianism.The last Chapter, The Conclusion, objectively evaluates the version from the following five aspects:It is a great contribution as the first complete English version; the original meaning, in a sense, is expressed faithfully by combining the text and explanary notes; criticizing Confucianism but praising Christianism is very obvious in the version by the aid of remarks in the footnotes; flexible translation methods and variable sentence structures are used; there are many regrets left because of unsufficient preparation by Collie for the version.