The Translation Of Culturally-loaded Concepts In Lun Yu

Chinese scholars in ancient times were wont to say "A half of Lun Yu is enough for governing the country." People today are attaching more and more importance to the place of Lun Yu in Chinese classics. In fact, Lun Yu, also called The Analects, Analects of Confucius or The Confucian Analects, is the quintessence of both Confucian culture and Chinese traditional culture. As a collection of the words and deeds of Confucius and his disciples, Lun Yu, which contains a great many subjects from ethics, education and philosophy to politics and represents the crystallization of wisdom over the two thousand years, is the most frequently translated of the Chinese traditional classical works. In recent years, it has been gaining more and more popularity at home and abroad. What's more, its English translations have evolved through a long history and having been paid equal attention. Quite a number of scholars in and out of China have studied the translations of Lun Yu from various perspectives with remarkable achievements. On the basis of previous studies, this thesis tries to make a contrastive study of four different English versions of some culturally-loaded concepts in Lun Yu, respectively translated by James Legge, Ku Hung-ming, Arthur Waley and Lin Yutang, from the perspective of the Manipulation Theory.The Manipulation Theory was initiated by theorists like Holmes, Hermans, Even-Zohar, and Toury and developed by the later Manipulation group scholars, especially Lefevere. According to Lefevere, "the most important consideration is not how words are matched on the page, but why they are matched that way, what social, literary, ideological considerations led translators to translate as they did, what they hoped to achieve by translating as they did, whether they can be said to have achieved their goals or not, and why."(Lefevere 2004b:81) Translation Studies is considered as a target/product-oriented, systemic, functional, essentially descriptive field of schotarly investigation. He also believes that "two factors basically determine the image of a work of literature as projected by a translation. These two factors are, in order of importance, the translator's ideology (whether he/she willingly embraces it, or whether it is imposed on him/her as a constraint by some form of patronage) and the poetics dominant in the receiving literature at the time the translation is made." (Lefevere 2004a:41)The author compares the four different versions of the culturally-loaded concepts ren, junzi and xiaoren from the aspects of ideology and poetics. The analysis of the four versions shows that due to different ideologies and poetics, the translation of culturally-loaded concepts may have different styles and achieve different effects.