The English Versions Of The Analects: A Study From The Perspective Of Ideology Differences

The Analects is one of the classical works of Confucianism, which intensively reflects his political views, ethical thoughts, moral ideas as well as educational principles and so on. The Analects deeply influences the ideology and culture of China and also of the whole world. During the past twenty years, more and more scholars paid attention to the study of the English versions of The Analects. However, most of them made their studies from the perspective of analyzing and comparing the English versions, and there were few studies from the perspective of ideology. This thesis studies the English versions of The Analects from the perspective of different ideologies of the translator.Ideology is a complicated philosophical concept. This thesis studies it from the perspective of Sociology. Translation is a purposeful activity, which is inevitably influenced by certain purpose and also certain ideology. Based on"approach to translation as adaptation and selection", this thesis discusses the relationship between ideology and translation. And then the thesis compares versions of Legge and Ku Hungming to analyze the relationship. Owning to their different life backgrounds, Legge and Ku Hungming hold different ideologies. Therefore, there are obvious differences between their translations of some key concepts, such as Ren, Li, Tian, Dao, and Junzi/Xiaoren. Influenced by his Christianity ideology, Legge employed a word-to-word translation, and adopted a lot of commentaries of Chinese Confucian scholars to show a complete and native version of The Analects to other missionaries and to better serve for the missionary work. He adopted foreignization strategy as his main translation strategy, and the most obvious characteristic of his version is its fidelity to the original. Totally different from Legge, Ku was a complete cultural conservative, and his cultural conservative ideology has also influenced his translation of The Analects. Influenced by this ideology, Ku made an utmost effort to publicize the advantages of Chinese culture and insisted that Chinese culture was much better than that of Westerners. Domestication strategy is the main translation strategy he employed in his translating of The Analects. Different from Legge's version, Ku's version is strongly featured by Western-style. He used Western-style words and expressions to render The Analects and he also quoted Western reference materials to illustrate the original to minimize cultural barriers for Western readers.