A Comparative Study On The Four English Versions Of The Analects Of Confucius

This thesis focuses on the comparative study of the four English translations of The Analects of Confucius from the perspective of Relevance, trying to discover the possible factors leading to version diversities and the interpretation power of Relevance Theory (RT) on the translation of The Analects of Confucius. And the research method is text comparison.Relevance Theory, proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, mainly contains three key concepts:relevance, contextual effect and processing effort, taking relevance as invariant while context as variant. According to Ernst-August Gutt's research in translation guided by RT and other scholars' study on the factors linked to the translator's subjectivity, we find that the translator's subjectivity has a direct influence on the contextual effect of the target text and the processing effort of the target reader, and the translator's subjectivity is linguistically and culturally dependent.To demonstrate different possible factors, this thesis takes as a case study the English versions of The Analects of Confucius translated by James Legge, Arthur Waley, D.C. Lau and Pan Fu'en & Wen Shaoxia. As a result, the author finds out that, linguistically, the translator's understanding and reproducing the meaning, sentence structure and the stylistic effect of the original is the first concern in leading to the version diversity; culturally, the ideology, religion and patronage, cultural image clearly play vital role in the translator's subjectivity and the version diversity. Such discussions can not only tell the major factors related to the translator's subjectivity in a tangible way, but also prove that RT is applicable in analyzing the whole cognitive process of the translator.