Culture-Oriented Functional Approaches To The Translation Of The Analects Of Confucius

This thesis is intended to combine functional translation theory with the translation of Chinese Classics, by taking The Analects of Confucius, the most influential cultural and philosophic ancient literature in China, as an example. Functional translation theory, raised by Katharina Reiss, Hans Vermeer and Holz Manttari, agrees and upholds that translating is both an interlingual action and an intercultural action. Besides carefully studying those factors at linguistic level, we must study factors at extra-linguistic level, that is, cultural factors which are closely related to languages.Functional translation theory stresses the purposefulness, communicativeness and interculturalness of translational actions or events. Compared with the traditional linguistic approaches, functional approaches to translating appear to be more dynamic. In the latter part of this thesis, the author analyzes translations from different versions of The Analects to prove how functional translation theory works in serving translating purposes, accomplishing the task of communication and giving prominence to cultural communication.