| Tao Te Ching enjoys a good reputation as the classic of Chinese culture and philosophy for its profound thought and concise language style, and it has exerted great influence not only on traditional Chinese culture and philosophy but also on the social life and many other fields. Western scholars have also noticed the significance of this classical work. The investigation and exploration of Tao Te Ching has never ceased since its emergence, and it has been translated into many languages to such a great number next to Bible, which evidences its popularity among international scholars. The translation of Tao Te Ching has promoted the transmission of Daoism and enhanced the communication of Chinese culture with the World culture.This has laid a foundation for further investigation of many other ancient Chinese philosophies. The growing China and its present situation doom to introduce the best thoughts to the world and the world is also eager to know China completely. The translation of classical works could just serve as a bridge. It is under such an international environment that motivates the author to carry out such a kind of study.There are voluminous research on the Tao Te Ching and its translations, but the yardstick to evaluate the quality of translations has not yet receive consensus in the learned society, thus it would be a thorny issue to analyze Tao Te Ching and make an evaluation. Fortunately, Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL) which was proposed and developed by Halliday could serve for this purpose in that the theory emphasizes on the core conception of metafunction, which could be employed to appraise the translation work. It is believed that a good translation should perform the same metafunction as the original one do.A brief look at the literature concerning Tao Te Ching shows that the investigation of the translations of this book has not received its due attention, in that there is fewer research on the comparative study of English version of Tao Te Ching. There are some studies taking various approaches about the SFL, in particular the three metafunctions, to explore similarities and differences of English versions only to make a general evaluation. Research on this issue from the perspective of SFL has been scarce, and the analysis of the metafunctions identified by M.A.K. Halliday (1994) has, at the best of my knowledge, not presented in literature. Thus this present study is an attempt to fill this gap. From the vantage point of SFL, this paper attempts to make a tentative comparison between two English versions of Tao Te Ching, so as to reveal the difficulties confronted in the translation of classical Chinese works, and more importantly this present thesis intends to contribute to the transmission of Chinese philosophy by applying SFL to the evaluation of translation of Tao Te Ching.The study checked feasibility and applicability of SFL in the analysis of translations of classic Chinese works. SFL has been proposed and developed from quite a long time, but the application of the core idea, metafunctions, to the study of Tao Te Ching has not been found. Thus whether SFL is applicable in this field of study awaits careful reexamination. Second, practically speaking, it will attend a relatively detailed analysis of the metafunction of the English versions of Tao Te Ching, and a comparison between the original version and these two English ones will also be conducted. Thus it will throw light on the second language learning and teaching, in that some lexis regarding the realization of semantics will be provided.However, this MA thesis could not be expected to conduct a very comprehensive investigation of lengthy analysis of the metafunctions of all English versions or all the items in one or two English translations. The comparison made in this research could not assess the quality of the two whole English versions of Tao De Ching, and assessment is confined to the selected extracts. As far as the structure of this thesis is concerned, it will be organized into five parts including introduction and concluding sections. The first part will deal with some general ideas of the present research by providing the motivation, significance and outline of the thesis. The second part will elaborate on the background of research by offering a detailed analysis on the research of SFL, Tao Te Ching, and the application of SFL into the investigation of Tao Te Ching so as to further find the gap that will be filled by the efforts of this thesis. The next section will present a framework on the basis of SFL by explaining what the metafunctions are, what the role of these function in SFL is, how these can be applied into the study of translation, etc. The fourth part will focus on a comparison of three metafunctions between original Chinese version and English versions that are employed in this research, and concentrate on a contrastive study of whether the English versions have achieved the same metafunction as the Chinese version does, if yes, then to what extend they have done so, if no, then also to what degree they have not done so? The last section will state the major findings and limitations of this research, and further suggestions will be provided for further study. |
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