Contrastive Study On English Translations Of Shijing From Postcolonial Perspective

In recent years, with the rise of postcolonial theory, translation studies has realizedthe cultural and postcolonial turn from the primitive pure linguistic translation studies,and started to pay attention to studying the external factors that may affect the processand result of translation, such as the cultural and political factors implied in thetranslation. Under such circumstances, Chinese scholars also begin to introduce andapply postcolonial translation theory into translation studies.Seeing from the current cultural exchange between China and English-languagecountries, it is easy to draw the conclusion that China represents the dominated culture,while America and England represent the hegemonic culture, there is obvious inequalityexisted in the cultural exchange. The phenomenon gets full representation in the Englishtranslation of Chinese Classics; since Shijing is one of the oldest Classics in China, itscontent nearly covers every aspect of Chinese ancient people’s life and there are fewstudies on Shijing from the postcolonial perspective, so the thesis choose Shijing as itsstudy object. Through the contrastive study on Xu Yuanchong’s and James Legge’s Englishtranslations of Shijing from postcolonial perspective in terms of the form, sound andsense, the author concludes that the resistant translation strategy (foreignizing translation)adopted by Xu has achieved better effect in preserving the original beauty in form, soundand sense compared to the domesticating translation strategy Legge adopts. Therefore,the study proves that when translating the texts with strong cultural flavor from thedominated culture to the hegemonic culture, resistant translation strategy can resist thecultural hegemony and imperialism of the hegemonic culture, make the target-languagereaders truly feel the foreignness of the foreign culture by breaking the norms in thetarget-language cultures instead of recognizing themselves in the foreign texts tostrengthen their superiority to the dominated culture and thus hindering the equaldialogue between the dominated culture and the hegemonic culture. When the dominatedcultural texts translated into hegemonic culture, resistant translation strategy canminimize the role of translation as a channel of decolonization, while domesticatingtranslation may consolidate the role of translation as a channel of colonization. So whentranslating Chinese Classics like Shijing into English, resistant translation strategy isrecommended to adopt to realize the equal dialogue between China and theEnglish-language cultures.