Buddhist Image In The Eye Of A Missionary Translator

Fo Guo Ji, a documentary travel book written by the Buddhist monk Faxian in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, is a valuable primary source for the study of South and Central Asia and the history of Buddhism in China. The missionary translator Dr. James Legge published the most faithful translation of Faxian's travels with notes and commentaries in 1886 under the title A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms.In the light of modem translation theories, this thesis probes into the linguistic and cultural aspects of Dr. Legge's A Record of Buddhistic Kingdom, evaluating the loss and gain of the Buddhist text in translation. Through illustrative analyses, it is found out that in pursuit of fidelity, Legge adopted foreignization as an approach of translation, a source-culture-oriented way of reproducing the source text, trying to give a version of the text which should represent the meaning of the original and at the same time to keep the features of the original, including retaining Chinese sentence patterns and cultural factors. According to the hermeneutic theory, misunderstanding begets mistranslation. So it is must be understood that errors occur inevitably due to the knowledge limitations of the translator. With theories of the functional school of translation, this thesis explicates in what way the translator's orientation and religious philosophy are related to his specific way of deciphering and transmitting the cultural image of the Buddhist text.