Constructing China’s Cultural Identity Through The Translation Of Chinese Classics

Currently, many countries in the world attach great importance to soft power when they try to enhance their hard power like politics, economy, and military. For quite a long time, there is a lack of understanding or even misunderstanding toward Chinese traditional culture in the western world. And it requires us to rebuild our complete and authentic cultural image through translating Chinese classics.This paper attempts to make a comparison of four English versions of Xiaojing, one of "the thirteen classics" of Confucianism, to explore the differences caused by adopting, mainly, either domestication or foreignization translation strategy. The first chapter gives a brief introduction of Xiaojing, historical position, texture background and its translation into foreign languages (particularity into English). The second chapter is the literature review of Xiaojing which introduces personal experience and motivation of each translator, their translation works, strategy, and general comments on the four versions. The third chapter focuses on Venuti’s foreignizing translation views from the aspect of reconstructing China’s cultural identity. In the fourth chapter, by comparing these four English versions of Xiaojing on lexical, syntactic, and stylistic levels, the result indicates that the major differences are determined by adopting either domestication or foreignization translation strategy. The conclusion can be drawn from the comparison of four versions that foreignization will actually be conducive to the reconstruction of China’s cultural identity by persevering original flavor of cultural and linguistic differences.