A Comparative Study Of Two English Versions Of Chu Ci From The Perspective Of Translation Ethics

Translation is an act of ethics and it is crucial to correctly cope with various human relations and coordinate the conflicts occurring between domestic and foreign culture during the actual translation activity, which concerns whether it will succeed or not. Though the study of translation ethics began a little late both in China and abroad, more and more scholars have come to this field. As China's international identity is improving for its economic development, a unique cultural identity is still needed. In this respect translating Chinese classics into English is becoming especially important in the process of cultural exportation due to its nature of cultural load and should be guided by translation ethics so as to achieve an ideal effect of cultural exportation.Chu Ci is the earliest and most splendid poetry collection of romanticism in ancient China, whose different translations can provide rich materials for contrastive analysis of translation studies. From the perspective of translation ethics and guided by Finnish translation scholar Andrew Chesterman's four models of translation ethics, say, representation, service, communication and norm-based ethics, this thesis makes a contrastive study of two versions of Chu Ci (Xu Yuanchong's version and Sun Dayu's version), especially, two translations of Li Sao, in order to explain the reasons why these two versions are so different and affected by ethical elements.First, under the guidance of ethics of representation, this thesis analyzes two versions of Chu Ci in aspects of artistic image, sound effect and form to explain why the two translators adopted different translation methods from the textual level. In artistic image, the author discusses the representation of names of herbs, places and fairy and historical figures; in sound effect, the representation of rhyme and the fill-in character; in poetical form, the formal characteristic of Chinese poetry and the representation by the means of syllables.Then, because of the conflicts between the ethics of representation and norm-based ethics, this thesis points out that there are restrictions, such as readers'language expectation and translators'responsibility, in translating the original text. At the same time the versions should be compromised in the demand of service ethics by considering the target reader and the book layout. At last, on the basis of the nature of cultural exportation, this thesis tries to propose a plausible method for the translation of Chinese classics for the purpose of communication ethics.