A Study Of The English Translation Of Zhuangzi

This thesis is a study of the English translation of Zhuangzi from the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics. Three complete translations, James Legge's version, Wang Rongpei's version and V.H. Mair's version, are studied and analyzed. They are studied from the perspective of the nature of their translations, the interpretability of their translations, the relation between the source text and their translations, the three translators'horizon before translation, and two kinds of fusion of horizons in their translations.Through sample analyses, we discover that due to the unique literary style, the great difference between Chinese and English and their cultures, and the differences of translators'horizons, the three translations are fundamentally the interpretation of the source text. The analyses of interpretability of the three translations from the horizon gap enable us to come to the conclusion that the three translations'interpretability vary from each other due to the differences of their focus. Legge's translation is faithful and accurate in conveying the linguistic features of the original text. Thus it has higher interpretability in terms of language. However, due to the obstacles of language and culture, there are many misunderstandings of the meanings of characters and sentence patterns in his translation. Moreover, there is still a gap between his understanding and the thought of source text. Thus his translation is of lower interpretability in terms of the meaning conveyed. As a native translator, Wang's translation grasps the main ideas of the original text and conveys the philosophical thought of Zhuangzi successfully. Therefore, his translation is of higher interpretability in terms of the philosophical thought. However, his version pays too much attention to the fluency of the target text and consequently many important terms of the source text are only paraphrased. Many special linguistic features get lost in his translation. Thus his translation has lower interpretability in terms of the translation of linguistic features. Mair regards Zhuangzi firstly and foremost as a literary work rather than a philosophical one. Thus his translation emphasizes the conveying of literary characteristics. For example, he translates many four-character-idioms and parallel structures into verses, in which, the artistic features of the original text are conveyed efficiently. Thus his translation is of higher interpretability in the literary features. However, as a foreign translator just like Legge, he meets great challenges in the understanding of the meanings of important terms and sentences. His translation of such terms is sometimes too literal and cannot convey their underlying meanings. Therefore, his translation has lower interpretability in terms of philosophical thought. Through an analysis of the three translations we discover that when the horizon of Zhuangzi is crystallized into English, it has different horizons in the target language. On one hand, parts of its horizon are distorted and get lost in the process of translation due to the differences between languages and cultures. On the other hand, there are newly-born horizons in the three translations. The obscurity and multiplicity of the original text is replaced by English text. By analyzing three translators'horizon before translation, we discover that the comprehensive understanding of Chinese culture and well grasp of ancient Chinese are fundamental bases for the successful translation of Zhuangzi. All the three translators adopt literal translation and try their best to preserve the unique characteristics of Zhuangzi from different perspectives. We also analyze the first fusion of horizons from the lexical and syntactic aspects and the second fusion of horizons from the perspective of translation of culture-specific words and figures of speech. Suggestions are given in the retranslation of Zhuangzi concerning these aspects.