On Cultural Reservation And Evaporation In Translating Ancient Chinese Into English

Through continual changes in the cultural corridor with a history of several thousand years, Chinese has developed into two language systems, namely ancient Chinese system and vernacular Chinese system. Ancient Chinese with characteristics of solemnity, elegance and concision is a written language formulated on the basis of classical works of pre-Qin dynasty. As a cultural giant mastering both the ancient learning and the modern learning, Ch'ien Chung-shu has achieved great attainments in ancient Chinese. In his novel Wei-ch'eng, ancient Chinese could be found here and there. Mr. Ch'ien elaborately decorates the modern novel with some ancient Chinese to make sharp contrast and generate special effects. Ancient Chinese not only adds deep historical and cultural connotations to the novel but also closely relates to character portrait and thematic significance of the novel.The English translation of ancient Chinese, undoubtedly, is a key point as well as a difficult part in the English translation of Wei-ch'eng. Thus the author of the present thesis puts the English translation of ancient Chinese in Wei-ch'eng in the framework of hermeneutics to analyze its cultural reservation and evaporation. The central concepts of hermeneutics suggested by Has-Georg Gadamer as fore-understanding and prejudice, fusion of horizons and effective history and the hermeneutic motion brought forward by George Steiner as trust, aggression, incorporation and compensation are woven together to lay the theoretical foundation of this thesis. By this way, the author of the thesis wants to make some guidance and reference for the translation of Wei-ch'eng in the future.This paper tries to study the English version of Wei-ch'eng translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao from the perspective of hermeneutics, and probes into the critical issue of cultural reservation and evaporation of ancient Chinese in the English translation. The first chapter gives a general introduction to Ch'ien Chung-shu, Wei-ch'eng and its English version. The second chapter briefly introduces hermeneutic theory, and discusses relations between hermeneutics and translation. The third chapter differentiates ancient Chinese from vernacular Chinese and illustrates characteristics of ancient Chinese foremost. Then taking some examples of the English translation of ancient Chinese from Fortress Besieged for a case study, it adopts hermeneutic theory to analyze translation process and translation techniques in the examples. Afterwards it gradually reveals cultural reservation and evaporation which have happened to various degrees in linguistic aspect, historical context and character portrait, rhetorical effects and thematic significance of the novel. On the basis of the hermeneutic theory, this paper carries on a hermeneutic research on the English translation of ancient Chinese in Fortress Besieged. The research result indicates that this English version suffers relatively severe cultural losses in translating ancient Chinese into English. Therefore, the retranslation of Wei-ch'eng should not only break down the limitation resulted from the solitariness of the current English version which is the one translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao but also fulfill the historical task of cultural reservation in translating ancient Chinese into English.