Arthur Waley Translated The Tao Te Ching "cultural Interpretation

The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought, published by Arthur Waley in 1934 , is a classic translation of Tao Te Ching in the West. Waley put Tao Te Ching into the review of the entire ancient Chinese ideological system, advocating that the translation of Tao Te Ching was both a "historical" or a "philological" one, for the reason that the importance of the original says with detailed accuracy.In fact, in the process of translation, Waley intended to establish a new method, though he was still influenced by the translators before him. And he was really optimistic to do an archaeological research about Chinese thoughts.This thesis intends to investigate how Chinese thoughts have been transformed in Waley's translation. Based on the framework of hermeneutics and modern translation studies, it is discussed from the perspective of cultural study. Through the study of the translation "Tian" in Waley's text, we could understand the translation strategies he adopted and the cultural intentions encoded in. The whole paper consists of five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction which summarizes the historical study of the translation of Tao Te Ching and presents the methods, research questions and significances of the study. The second chapter analyzes the relationship between the concepts of "Tian" and "Di" in order to discover the transformation of cosmetic heaven into impersonate one. The third chapter describs the translation of "Tian Xia" in five different versions of Tao Te Ching, which is based on a comparision at the lexical level. The forth chapter studies the translation of "Tian Dao" and the isomorphic relationship between "Tian" and "Dao". Through this description of the translation of Tao, Waley's contribution is therefore re-evaluated. And the last chapter was the conclusion.