The Translation Of Tao Te Ching In Britain And America: A Perspective Of Reception Theory

Tao Te Ching, the earliest Taoist philosophical text in China, is of profoundly deep significance in Chinese society, both in its philosophical and religious influences and its secular application to everyday life. Since its first English translation in 1868 by the Englishman John Chalmers, it has also received great attention around the world, especially in Britain and America. In the last century, Tao Te Ching was translated and published successively, which makes it the most widely translated text except the Bible. On the basis of the above facts, the author produces great interest in the translation of Tao Te Ching in Britain and America. In the thesis, she intends to explore the English translation of this Chinese classic from the perspective of reception theory.As a new and influential paradigm and methodology in literary theories, reception theory or reception aesthetics marks a shift in concern from the author and the work to the text-reader relationship in literary criticism. It holds the idea that readers' reaction is a criterion for judging the quality and value of a literary work. In the process of the production of a literary text, the author should consider the readers' social experience, aesthetic tendency and receptive ability, which constitute the readers' "horizon of expectations". In addition, in a literary text, there are many spots of indeterminacies and blanks which establish a bridge between the creative consciousness of the work and the readers' receptive consciousness. It is these qualities that need the readers to concretize according to their own understanding. In this way, readers can play an active role in the realization of a text, and make a literary work livelier.In this thesis, the author chooses four English versions of Tao Te Ching which can represent the lapse of time as well as regional diversity. With the help of the two concepts of "horizon of expectations" and "indeterminacy" inreception theory, she analyzes some samples from the four versions. The result of this analysis shows that owing to differences of the historical and cultural background, the four translators have different "horizons of expectations";moreover, the target readers of the four versions also have their individual "horizons of expectations" and degrees of receptivity. In view of the above two aspects, the four translators with their particular properties come to different concretizations in the aesthetic pole for those blanks and indeterminacies in the artistic pole, hence different translations of the original text.Instead of evaluating the relative gains and losses in the four versions, the paper only intends to probe the causes why there are so many translations of Tao Te Ching in Britain and America. It concludes that Tao Te Ching, like an abundant mineral resource, can not be fully excavated by a single interpretation. Furthermore, one version of Tao Te Ching can not satisfy the need of every reader in every period. Only through reading many versions of it, can we gradually get closer and closer to the original meaning of the work.