On Legge’s Translation Strategies In His Rendering Of Shangshu In Comparison With Those Employed By Du And Luo:a Study Based On Schema Theory

With the speeding up of globalization and the increasingly frequent intercultural communication between the East and the West, China has begun attaching greater importance to "cultural export". Confucian culture, which has always been standing at the core of traditional Chinese culture, naturally attracts much attention of the people who are concerned with the spreading of Chinese culture. One of the most effective and far-reaching ways to disseminate Chinese culture is, undoubtedly, to translate those prominent Confucian classics into foreign languages. As one of the Five Classics, Shangshu is a very important historical record indispensable for the Western people to know more and deeper about the Chinese culture. Yet, because Shangshu had been written long before Qin Dynasty, the language in the Book was extremely ancient, or "archaic and abstruse", as some scholars put it, the translation of it is therefore made unimaginably difficult. Despite of the difficulties, however, some very great scholars courageously took the challenge and undertook the great project. James Legge, the most famous19th century British missionary-sinologist, was one of those great scholars. He was also the first person in the world who has ever done systematic study of the Confucianism and produced a complete translation of the "Four Books" and "Five Classics", with Shangshu as a volume in the whole set named The Chinese Classics, which remains to be regarded as the "standard English version" of the Confucian classics by the world sinologists although more than a century has passed since its first publication. It is believed by the present thesis that many factors may have contributed to the success of The Chinese Classics, but the effective employment of appropriate translation strategies was undoubtedly among the most significant. In the1990s, another two English versions of Shangshu were produced by two Chinese scholars separately. But as far as the public responses and spreading effect and influence are concerned, these two versions seem no match for Legge’s version. Taking into account what has been discussed above, the present thesis takes Legge’s version of Shangshu as the object of study, focusing on the translation strategies employed by the translator.Nowadays, using for reference and absorbing academic resources from other disciplines has become a general tendency in translation studies. For example, the Schema Theory, which was originated in psychology, has exerted a great influence on the cognitive process of translation studies. Due to the dynamic and changeable characteristics of schemata, the translator needs to accommodate or transform schemata to transmit messages in a certain context so as to ensure a correct and appropriate conveyance of the ideas of the original text. The present thesis holds that introducing the three interactive relations between schemata and the text, namely schema correspondence, schema conflict, and schema default, into Chinese-English translation studies may help us get a deeper understanding and cognition of the translator’s choices of translation strategies in the translating process.Therefore, this thesis attempts to investigate, on the basis of Schema Theory, Legge’s employment of translation strategies in his rendering of Shangshu, with the comparison of the strategies employed in Du’s and Luo’s versions of Shangshu, to see how Legge makes the choice of his strategies in response to the three different kinds of schemata.The whole thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One is Introduction, in which the research background, the research significance and the framework of the study is briefly introduced.Chapter Two is An Overview of Shangshu and its Three English versions involved in the study. In this chapter, the author gives a general introduction to both the original Shangshu—its nature and status in history, its various editions (including the Modern and Ancient Texts), and its complicated circulations—and the three English versions of Shangshu discussed in the study: one by Legge, one by Du Ruiqing, and the other by Luo Zhiye.Chapter Three serves as the theoretic basis for the study. In this part, a brief discussion is given of the history, the content, and the applications of Schema Theory, followed by an exploration of the relationship between schema theory and translation studies.Chapter Four investigates in detail Legge’s choice of translation strategies in his rendering of Shangshu in manipulating schema correspondence, schema conflict, and schema default, with a comparison with those employed by Du and Luo respectively in the same contexts as well as an analysis of the causes for their differences.Chapter Five is the conclusion of the thesis.