Chinese Classics Translation And The Representation Of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Identity In The West

Cultural identity is often understood as two viewpoints:1)essential cultural characters peculiar to some nation or group in given times;2)identity positioning subject to reconstruction in history.Westerners' knowledge about Chinese cultural identity has long been either distorted or scanty,which accordingly calls for representing an authentic contemporary cultural identity in the West through literature translation.And Chinese authorities have been attempting to(re)translate classics to illustrate Chinese cultural identity,thereby this thesis is designed to discuss the motivation for(re)translating classics and the roles of the(re)translated classics in the target readership's understanding contemporary Chinese cultural identity.This thesis brings translation acts as a whole into the framework of construction of cultural identity for examination.In the framework,translation is considered as an act of recollecting history,and every recollecting inevitably involves tampering with history for the purpose of justifying the present.And contrastive analyses of different translated excerpts of Fu Sheng Liu Ji(浮生六记,translated by Lin Yutang and Shirley Black) and The Analects(论语,translated by Xu Zhigang and Arthur Waley) reveal that translators manipulate translations to justify the cultural identity held by different groups represented by them respectively;and a juxtaposition of the poetics(considered as cultural identity peculiar to some intellectual group) in Fu Sheng Liu Ji and that advocated by Lin Yutang shows that their poetics match up with each other.Thereby,it is safe to conclude that the motivation for(re)translating classics is to historically justify and substantiate the validity of current cultural identity.More importantly,the ever-manipulated past cultural identity in classics has consistent linear relation with current one,which provides readership with a traceable clue to the historical origin and prototype of current identity,thus more knowledge about background convincing the target readership of the validity of the contemporary cultural identity.Therefore,understanding Chinese cultural identity should be based on ample knowledge about past identity and current one.That is to say,classics translation and contemporary translation play equal important role in cross-cultural communication.However,a rough examination on the translation project over past 30 years exposes that translation projects of Chinese authorities concentrate on classics translation,while most contemporary literature translation are conducted by western publishing houses,which is limited into vernacular and women subjects,being misleadingly directed to a backward,mysterious,and lascivious Chinese cultural identity.Thereby patrons and translators at home and abroad should attach more importance to the contemporary works reflective of various current Chinese cultural identities.