A Corpus-based Study On The Translation Of Key Philosophihcal Terms In The Analects Of Confucius

This research combines the methods of corpus building and qualitative analysis for the purpose of direct comparison of five key philosophical terms between the two authentic versions of The Analects of Confucius. They are "Ren", "Yi", "Li", "Zhi" and "Xin". At present, corpus are widely used in computer aided translation and this paper brought on a new way on corpus application in the pre-editing phase of the large amounts of data of both the source language and the target language, which saved much time and enable the researcher to extract more samples within a short period for the analysis.The result of this study shows that polysemy is quite common in the meanings of philosophical terms in Chinese classics. Therefore, neither literal translation nor free translation is sufficient enough to compensate the lost meanings during the process of translation and both translating methods must be applied at the same time. Thus, to add a footnote can be a good option to solve the problem.In addition, since those philosophical terms are created under different cultural backgrounds of the East and the West, in order to reveal the full picture behind those philosophical terms, we have to study the origins of these terms from the perspectives of epistemology and etymology.The major findings of this research are as follows:1. Different cultural and epistemological developments created different connotations of the Western and Eastern philosophical terms.2. Before choosing the proper counterparts for the translation of Chinese philosophical terms, translators should study the etymologies of those terms.3. The discrepancies aroused can be eliminated through footnotes.