On Translation Strategies Of James Legge's Tao Te Ching

Tao Te Ching, as one of the Chinese classics, has attracted a lot of attention in China and abroad, despite its modest length of a little over 5,000 characters. A great number of people have done many studies of its author Lao Tsu and the book itself. Furthermore, there have existed numerous English translations of the book, and against the background new versions are keeping coming out every year. But compared with the number of English translations, studies on the translations are much less, and it is in particular true of James Legge's translation of the book.Based on the related studies at home and abroad, the thesis chooses James Legge's translation of Tao Te Ching as the objective of study and attempts to make a profound analysis and study of the version in terms of translation strategies. The thesis uses the method of sampling investigation to choose 20 chapters from the total 81 chapters. The focus is to analyze the linguistic and cultural aspects in his version. On the linguistic level, the thesis chooses three linguistic aspects, that is, activeness/passiveness, hypotaxis/parataxis and staticness/dynamicness. The result is that James Legge used both domestication and foreignization. On the cultural level, the thesis chooses four key words and phrases which are rich in cultural connotations and are the very embodiment of the philosophic thought. The four key words and phrases are "Dao", "De", "zi-ran" and "wu-wei". They have exerted widespread influence on the Chinese people's attitudes towards life. That is why the thesis chooses and makes an in-depth study of them. The result shows that on the cultural level there are more domesticated translations than foreignized ones. Thus, we can draw to the conclusion that in this aspect James Legge was inclined to adopt the translation strategy of domestication. Furthermore, it demonstrates that translation is not a choice between pure domestication and pure foreignization; instead it is a combination of the two proportionally or disproportionally. James Legge, as a famous sinologist, had good intentions before embarking on the translation of Chinese classics, that is, to represent the authentic Chinese culture. In the translation practice, however, his English thinking mode, missionary tasks and consideration of readers' factors as well as the version's readability jointly influenced his choice of translation strategies. On account of the reasons above, the translation turned out to be a version with combined domestication and foreignization.