A Comparative Study Of Four English Versions Of Lun Chi Jiu Zhan

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, outstanding achievements have been made concerning Mao Zedong Thought rather than translation studies on Mao’s political works. Lun Chi Jiu Zhan, as one of the most important political articles of Mao Zedong, has ever exerted significant influence on the situation during the period of the War of Resistance against Japan. Since in1938, in order to expand the influence of Lun Chi Jiu Zhan at home and abroad, the Communist Party of China (the CPC) decided to carry on the task of translating it into English at home and abroad. As a result, a couple of translations were successively published in domestic and oversea journals and a great many achievements have been made so far. For a long time, however, researches have been made in focus on studying the English versions of Selected Works of Mao Zedong, while the study on the English versions of Lun Chi Jiu Zhan has not deserved enough attention yet; as a result, no special and systematic study has been made on its translation.Definitely, translation studies on Lun Chi Jiu Zhan help to diffuse Chinese culture and provide the foreign readers with a panorama of the revolutionary history in China. In view of this, the thesis, from the perspective of text itself and communication studies, respectively makes a comparative study of the English versions of Lun Chi Jiu Zhan, in expectation of presenting an integrated and systematic study to readers. By comparing four English versions, How China Can Win published on The Translation, Shih Ming’s A Prolonged War and the other two versions respectively published by Lawrence&Wishart and Foreign Language Press, the author intends to explore deep causes for differences in textual factors and communication.The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is the Introduction, covering the research background, significance as well as the framework of the thesis. The second chapter is to give an account of Lun Chi Jiu Zhan and its English versions, especially four influential versions and besides, the previous studies on the English versions of Lun Chi Jiu Zhan are presented here as well. Chapter Three presents a comparative study of four versions from the perspective of communication, expounding on the communicating environments and communicating channels of four English versions respectively. The thesis, based on the study on the special situations of the English translations, expects to give some clues for the existing differences and problems in translation. Chapter Four probes into a comparative study of four English versions of Lun Chi Jiu Zhan from the textual perspective, mainly focusing on three levels of the text:lexical, syntactic and contextual levels.The last part is the Conclusion, which sums up the major findings and conclusions of the thesis, points out its limitations and comes up with suggestions for further study in this regard.