| Mencius is an important part of the Confucian classics, exerting considerable influence on traditional Chinese culture and eastern civilization, and was disseminated to the west during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Studies on the translation of Mencius are of academic and realistic significance for cultural exchanges.The Scottish sinologist James Legge (1815-1897) was the first scholar who systematically rendered the Chinese classics into English, and his version of Mencius is one of the representative ones, being considered as a standard text for more than 100 years. In light of functional equivalence theory and communicative translation theory, this thesis attempts to analyse James Legge's English version of Mencius in search of translation strategies Legge adopted to examine essential translation techniques for traditional Chinese classics.The thesis begins with an introduction to the necessary knowledge of Mencius, such as its authorship, contents, literary features, status and influence, and a description of the dissemination of Mencius in the west. A literature review of studies on the translation of Mencius is also been presented. Based on Nida's functional equivalence theory and with a wealth of examples, the second chapter illustrates how Legge strived for the closest natural equivalence to the source text at three levels: the lexical level, the syntactic level and the stylistic level. It can be concluded generally that an ideal translation should be able to reproduce the original content, form, structure and style and impress the target readers in the same way as the source text impresses the source language readers. The third chapter explores Legge's techniques in dealing with cultural factors. Legge mainly employed the approaches of literal translation with footnotes, transliteration with footnotes and contextual translation in dealing with cultural factors, and these approaches help to retain the original cultural images and add foreign flavor to the translation.
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