Research On Transmutation Of Chinese Renderings Of The Biblical Creator: A Perspective Of Cultural Sign Of Chinese Character

The Bible is both religious and literary in nature. The history of Chinese Bibletranslation spans more than1,300years since the Tang dynasty, during which manyChinese Bible versions have been produced. Given linguistic taboo and worship oflanguage sign, the Chinese rendering of the biblical Creator, a core sign ofChristianity, is a choice to be made with great care. Chinese rendering of the BiblicalCreator has different features in different historical periods: missionaries ofJingjiao(景教) in the Tang dynasty, the initial stage, deployed some Buddhist andTaoist words to realize its inculturalization; the Catholic Jesuits in the late Ming andthe early Qing period valued “Confucius or Jesus” the opposite thinking mode, someof whom held that using Confucianism to explain the Christian doctrines, while othersof whom laid upon that using Christian doctrines to remove Confucianism; protestantsin the late Qing and the early Republic of China adopted “Confucius plus Jesus” thetolerating thinking mode and employed traditional Chinese characters to translatename of the Biblical Creator with an attempt to promote Christianization ofConfucianism gradually; the Confucian and Christian introduced “Confucius andJesus” the pluralism thinking mode in modern times, furthermore, the Christian, theCatholic and the atheists adopted耶�'�华yē hé huá,雅威yǎ wēi,亚卫yà wèirespectively as the name of the Biblical Creator in order to construct the their ownindependent discourse systems, in addition, Confucian Christians proposed newrendering for the Creator to realize localization of religious belief.The thesis is divided into five chapters: Chapter One is the simple introduction ofthis research; Chapter Two is the literature review in which the author proposes the necessity to further investigate into Chinese rendering of the Biblical Creator with anew perspective—cultural sign of Chinese character by means of historical analysismethod, after summarizing previous studies from approaches such as literature,sociology, culture and linguistics as for this translation phenomenon; Chapter Threeintroduces shape features of Chinese character and its cultural cognition; ChapterFour discusses complexity of the Biblical Creator in its Chinese translation as it is aspecial cultural complex, and then investigates into characteristics of Chineserenderings of the Biblical Creator and mechanism of character choice in fourhistorical periods (the Tang dynasty, the late Qing and the early Ming period, the lateQing and the early Republic of China, the modern times since1919), and lastly pointsout three major features of Chinese renderings of the Biblical Creator, that is,diversification, authorization and establishment; Chapter Five is the findings andlimitations of the research.The research results in two findings:(1) different thinking modes of translatorsin different historical stages are mainly responsible for transmutation of Chineserenderings of the Biblical Creator, which reflects a tension between Christianity’sinquiry of Chinese culture and Chinese culture’s re-inquiry of Christianity.(2)translators should pay more attention to constructing a similar cultural imagery inChinese culture context by making use of the traditional cultural cognitive psychologyinfiltrated in character signs especially in the foreign-to-Chinese cultural texttranslation.