A Comparative Study Of Two English Versions Of Lun Yu From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

Since 1980s with the "cultural turn" of translation studies, the Cultural School's voice began to be heard. Andre Lefevere, leading scholar of Cultural School, offers a new cultural perspective for translation studies. According to Lefevere, translation is a rewriting of the original; and rewriting is manipulation influenced by various social-cultural factors which mainly includes ideology and poetics.Lun Yu as one of the most important Chinese classics represents unique Chinese cultural characteristics. In the translation of Lun Yu, influenced by ideological and poetological factors, translators tend to accommodate the origin to certain cultural environment, thus produce various English versions which preserve and recast the Chinese cultural characteristics in different ways. In this thesis, two English versions are chosen to make comparative studies from the perspective of manipulation, one is "The Analects of Confucius" translated by British missionary James Legge published in 1861; the other is "Confucius Modernized:Thus Spoke the Master" published in 2005 translated by contemporary Chinese translator Xu Yuanchong. Different translation techniques in the translation of principal concepts and sentence structure would be studied under the influence of ideology and poetics.This paper analyzes the role that the cultural factors, especially the ideology and poetics, play in translation process which is considered a kind of rewriting or manipulation. This study is to benefit the translation of other Chinese classics and promote the cultural exchange between the East and the West.