Purposes, Strategies & Impacts: Comparative Studies On The Translation Of The Tao-te-ching

Being one of the representative works of the oriental culture, the Tao-te-ching (hereafter TTC) radiates its mysterious charm worldwide. Among its translations in foreign languages, English versions alone have added up to more than two hundred. Influenced by the differences between ancient Chinese and modern English, the divergences between Chinese and Western cultures, and other factors such as abstruseness of the target language, inconsistencies of various commentaries, great varieties of its Chinese versions, the translators are bound to encounter many problems, such as, which Chinese version they should choose to translate, how to deal with "loan characters" and those Chinese characters of a wide range of meanings, how to construe the original syntax. And because of their different translation purposes, competences and philosophical ideas, these translators have adopted different strategies of translation, which inevitable lead to different impacts of translation. Therefore, the translation of the TTC has always been controversial and needs to be clarified.As the choice among many versions of Chinese source text greatly influences the outcome of translations, this thesis begins by briefly introducing the original text of the TTC. Then the thesis makes comparative studies mainly on nineteen more influential English versions of the TTC and probes into both their linguistic and cultural aspects, covering difficulties of translation and the corresponding strategies taken by different translators. The theoretical support of the thesis includes skopos theory, ideology-governed translation, cultural view on translation, functional equivalence, formal equivalence and hermeneutic approach. The thesis argues that absolute definitive translation of the TTC is neither possible nor necessary for the following reasons. Firstly, all the translations feature their strong points, which are, however, accompanied by drawbacks and no translation seems to be the best one. Yet every kind of translation serves the translators' purposes and a certain group of researchers, regulators and general readers. Secondly, understanding of the TTC can neither be unified, and even Chinese experts on the TTC cannot agree with each other, now and past. Since understanding is a prerequisite of translation, there can never be an absolutely correct translation to fully...