A Study On The Translation Of The Analects From The Perspectives Of Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation

In recent years, as China's influence over the world is increasing day by day, more and more Westerners become interested in Chinese and China's traditional culture. The Analects, one of the classics of Confucianism, carries thousands of years'traditional culture of China, has a far-reaching impact on China's social development. Because of this, The Analects is continuously translated into different languages, introduced to the world. Its translation, particularly its English versions, has always been an important way for the foreigners to know about the Chinese culture. It is a bridge for cross-cultural communication. As The Analects has many English versions, the research on its English translations has also attracted more and more scholars.As an excellent prose of collected sayings, The Analects has recorded the sayings and deeds of Confucius and his disciples with concise and profound language. On one hand, The Analects is a great literal work with its unique linguistic features and writing styles. It expresses the philosophy of Confucius well with the most concise and fluent language. On the other hand, The Analects, as a great classic of Confucianism, contains rich Chinese traditional culture, ideas and philosophy of Confucius which have a great impact on the Chinese people for thousands of years. Then, when translating The Analects, how could a translator manage to not only keep his translation faithful to the original text and the author, but also to make his translation accord with the expressions of the target language so that it could be understood and accepted easily by the target language readers? And when it comes to the Chinese traditional culture, how could the translator manage to transmit these cultural factors without omission, and at the same time make these cultural factors easy to be accepted by the target language readers of a different cultural background? All these are worthy of further study. Newmark's theory of semantic translation and communicative translation has explored a new way for us to tackle these problems. To some extent, it also provides us a new perspective to study the translation of The Analects. He points out that any translation activity should take the various functions of language into consideration, not only to be faithful to the original author but also to be faithful to the target language readers. Semantic translation and communicative translation methods should be used flexibly in order to achieve the best effect of the translation. The two translation methods are of a whole, and not contradictory to each other. In fact, they are complementary. We couldn't say which one is better than the other either, because both of them have their own merits and demerits.In this thesis, the author chooses the two English versions translated respectively by Arthur Waley and D. C. Lau as the research texts and tries to analyze the two English versions from the perspectives of semantic translation and communicative translation basing on Newmark's translation theory. The analysis is mainly conducted at two levels: the linguistic level and the cultural level, in order to find out how the two translation methods are used on different levels and the effects of them. The author points out the different styles and features of the two versions and the merits and demerits of them. As to how to use semantic translation and communicative translation properly in translating The Analects, the author also gives some suggestions. It is hoped that the research in this thesis could be helpful to the translation of The Analects and to some extent, make some contribution to the translation of Chinese classics.