Influence Of Translator’s Cultural Identity On Translation

As a profound Chinese classic, Zhongyong (中庸), which wasincluded in the Book of Rites (礼记) then formed one of the Four Books(四书), has exerted great impact on China and the whole world. Formore than two thousand years, Zhongyong has continuously been asource of inspiration for the creative mind in Chinese intellectual history.So far, most of the researches on the translation of Zhongyong havebeen focusing on analysis of the text itself, little has been done on howthe distinctive translations are connected with the translators’ culturalidentities. Therefore, with the help of parallel corpus and contrastiveanalysis of James Legge’s version and Gu Hongming’s version ofZhongyong, this thesis intends to explore how translator’s culturalidentity influences his translation.As the concept of “cultural turn” emerged in the1990s, researchersno longer regarded translation as only transformation between twolanguages, but paid more attention to the impact and role of culture.Cultural identity, one of the key concepts in the context of globalpost-colonialism, serves as a new perspective on the study of thetranslator. Meanwhile, an analysis of the translator’s cultural identityenables us to better understand the original text, translation strategyand translator’s cultural preference. In the field of Zhongyongtranslation, James Legge (理雅各) and Gu Hongming (辜鸿铭), the twotranslators with reputation, have comparatively different culturalidentities. James Legge (1815-1897), a Scottish sinologist and missionaryin the19th century, was famous for his translation of Chinese Classics (中国经典), while Gu Hongming (1857-1928), a noted Chinese scholar in thelate Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China, devoted all his life todisseminating Chinese culture and held a unique position in the historyof translating Chinese classics. Based on such an analysis, this thesis explains the role that translation purpose plays in the application oftranslation strategy, elucidates the influence of translators’ beliefs ontheir interpretation of key terms and cultural messages, anddemonstrates the impact of translators’ background knowledge andmodes of thinking on their translation style. The author hopes that morestudies on translator’s cultural identity will be conducted.This thesis falls into six chapters. Chapter One is a brief introductionto the research background, purpose and significance, researchmethodology and structure of the thesis. In Chapter Two, thedevelopment of cultural identity and translation of Zhongyong arereviewed. The theoretical foundations for the English translation ofZhongyong are analyzed in Chapter Three. In Chapter Four, JamesLegge’s cultural identity and Gu Hongming’s cultural identity areexplored respectively. In Chapter Five, the influence of translator’scultural identity is demonstrated in detail. The last chapter concludesthe whole thesis.