A Study Of The Wisdom Of Laotse:in The Light Of Deconstruction

In the mid1960s, with the trend of anti-structuralism burgeoning in the Western Circle of Literature and Art, deconstruction came into being from then on. The essence of deconstruction lies in the fact that it resists the binary opposition, which characterized logocentrism. In1980s, the "cultural turn" pushed forward the development of translation theory, and the thought of deconstruction was introduced into translation studies, thus a promising panorama emerged into the translation field. This thesis mainly focuses on four approaches relevant to deconstruction, i.e. Pure Language; Differance; Foreignization and Intertextuality. In Chapter One, the theoretical background of the four scientific terms are mentioned. In Chapter Five, the connotations of them are given a detailed interpretation.The research subject of this thesis is The Wisdom of Laotse compiled by Lin Yutang in1948, whose original texts include Tao Te Ching and Chuangtse. It is well known that Tao Te Ching is a great philosophical work in ancient China as the philosophy thought is profound and the phrases are obscure and complicated. Since the traditional translation criteria, such as "faithfulness" and "equivalence" could no longer cater to the accurate and proper expression of the original, deconstructive translation theory demonstrates its uniqueness, and to some extent, it could render the translator a fresh enlightenment to study the translation and offer the readers a new perspective to appreciate the translation.In the analysis part of the thesis, the corpus software——Oxford WordSmith Tools is adopted. There are two aims of applying the software:one is to help select and sort out the sentences useful for the analysis of the thesis, so as to conduct the quantitative and qualitative analysis; the other is to calculate the total number of the sentences, which have embodied different translation approaches. As a result, the readers could get a general idea of the four approaches reflected in The Wisdom of Laotse from the statistics.Chapter Five is the body of the thesis, as it gives a detailed interpretation of The Wisdom of Laotse in the light of deconstruction. Through the relevant analysis of the selected contents, the thesis proves the feasibility and practicability of the four approaches under deconstruction. At the same time, the advantages of deconstruction are shown evidently.In Chapter Six, the limitations of deconstruction are pointed out and some suggestions are also put forward.The study of The Wisdom of Laotse from the standpoint of deconstruction would shed some light on the understanding of the theory for the readers and yield a few findings in the recognition of the four approaches. At last, the author desires to make some contribution to consolidating the relevant deconstructive study in Chinese translation circle.