Comparative Studies On The Two Translations Of Lun Yu

In the light of modern translational theories, this thesis probes into the linguistic and cultural aspects of the two rather influential English versions of The Analects of Confucius respectively by the famous Scottish Sinologist James Legge and the noted Chinese eccentric literati Ku Hungming, in search of the essentials of the translation techniques for translating Chinese classics.The introduction for the thesis covers necessary knowledge about the Chinese version of The Analects of Confucius in preparation for the comparative studies of the English versions, and illustrates the dissemination history of the Confucian masterpiece into the West and presents a literature review of scholars' studies on the translation. The second part analyzes the textual translation in the aspects of lexical, syntactic and stylistic levels to find out whether the expressions are functionally equivalent and what the translation techniques are. The third part is based on the functionalist approaches developed by the German school with Skopos theory as the most important theoretical basis and it explicates in what way the two translators' purposes and value orientation of translation are related to their ways of dealing with cultural images, which results in two different translations suitable for different readers and which will play different roles in cultural communication.