Encounter Antiquity: Deciphering James Legge's Translation Of Shooking

For more than a century, James Legge's translation of Shooking has been enjoying a far-reaching influence, remaining as the standard English version. It's thus worthwhile to probe into his translation. One of the focus of the thesis is an analysis of the linguistic features of James Legge's literal translation, a dominant technique for the antique language of the source text. According to him, literal translation serves to retain the original linguistic form, content and style. In terms of functional equivalence, one of the theoretical basis of this thesis, James Legge's translation should be justified overall. His translation turns out to be as archaic as the source text and yet regretfully occasionally lengthy and wordy. The prerequisite of translation, understanding, which is highlighted by the hermeneutic theory, another theoretical basis of this thesis, is generally correct though there is no denying errors occur sometimes, which is understandable for a foreigner. In addition, the words and sentences in Shooking are archaic and obscure, adding difficulty to comprehend the source text. Another focus of the thesis is the cultural aspects of James Legge's translation. By deciphering the cultural image of the translation, the thesis finds out James Legge's way to deal with the antique Chinese cultures has a great deal to do with his faith, religious philosophy and life experience, a triangulation framework of experience, mind and his translation. It's pointed out that James Legge's translation of Shooking serves to his missionary enterprise. Trying to enable the outside world to know about Chinese cultures through his translation, he located the Chinese cultures and Western cultures in a melting point. That's what the skopos theory said: Purpose dominates translation as it is.