Comparative Studies On James Legge's And Cary E.Baynes' Translations Of Book Of Changes

Since Book of Changes features profoundly mysterious language and rich cultural implications, it leads to difficulties in its explanation for translation, compounded by the already existent linguistic and cultural differences between Chinese and English. The thesis is concerned with how to translate it into a version that is faithful to the original text and acceptable to the readers in the target language through comparative studies of James Legge's and Cary F. Baynes' translations.Language is closely related to culture. Based on Skopos theory, the theory of function equivalence and Yanfu's principles of translation—Faithful, Expressiveness and Elegance, the thesis analyses and generalizes the loss and gains of the two translations in the aspects of linguistic (phonetic, lexical, semantic, syntactic, stylistic and so forth) and cultural ones. It probes into what makes the translation as they are in search of essentials of translation techniques for the translation of traditional Chinese classics.Legge tried to interpret it faithfully to the original text as much as possible in both its contents and language forms, and thus it is regarded as the standard one. And Baynes' translation is brief and more acceptable to the target readers. For all their brilliance in their translations, there are problems discussed in Chapter Two and Chapter Three of this thesis.To transmit the textual information together with its cultural implications of Book of Changes, Legge and Baynes made the translation readable, a reasonable combination of literal translation and liberation translation, and that of domestication and foreignization are expected. Replacing the cultural images of the source text with those of the target culture completely is by no means a sensible choice while rigidly keeping all the cultural images of the source text in the translation without explanations will reduce the readability.