On The Translation Of "Li ","De" And "Xin" In The Analects: From The Perspectie Of Cultural Translation

Confucius is one of the greatest educators and thinkers in the Chinese history, therepresentative of the axial age of the Chinese civilization, and Father of Confucianism.Lun Yu, a collection of the dialogues, remarks and the deeds between Confucius andhis students, is one of the classics of Confucianism. It bears extensive and profoundtraditional Chinese cultural and philosophical ideas and covers knowledge of diversefields, like philosophy, politics, military, education, religion, ethics, literature, musicand arts. Volumes of commentaries and annotations of Lun Yu outnumber twothousand copies, and they have been translated successively by many well-knownscholars and translators home and abroad. Gu Hongming, D.C. Lau, Lin Yutang, PanFuen&Wen Shaoxia, James Legge, Arthur Waley, Ezra Pound and Roger T. Ames&Henry J. Rosemont are representatives of those scholars and translators who enjoygreat reputation and popularity. Their English versions of Lun Yu and studies on them,apart from transmitting unique and profound traditional Chinese culture, have madegreat contribution to the communication between Chinese and Western cultures.The theoretical basis of the studies concerning the Analects is diversified, ofwhich the frequently employed theories include the Equivalence Theory, the SkoposTheory and the Cultural Translation Theory (CTT in short hereafter) etc. Attributingto profound cultural elements embedded in Lun Yu, CTT has been frequentlyemployed in the studies concerning the Analects.The Cultural Translation Theory is a kind of new translation theory put forwardby Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere. They hold the view that the essence of thetranslation studies is the cultural interaction study. Language is the carrier of theculture, while the culture is embedded in the language. Simple semantic and textualtranslations can no longer meet the demands of contemporary cultural communication.The “cultural turn” of the translation studies is inevitable. This thesis attempts tocomparatively analyze translations of the culture-loaded words “Li”,“De” and “Xin”rendered by six groups of translators based on CTT.This thesis consists of six parts. The first part is an introduction to researchbackground, questions, methodology, significance and the structure of the thesis. Thesecond part reviews the research findings on Lun Yu, the Analects and the evolution ofCTT. Besides, it introduces the translation background of the six groups of translators.It is stressed that translation studies should regard cultural communication as its finalobjective. The third, fourth and fifth parts have respectively discussed the translationsof the “Li”,“De” and “Xin”. The last part is the conclusion of this thesis. Apart froma summary of the thesis, the author has made complements to inadequacies oftranslations of culture-loaded words emerged in the six versions of the Analects.