A Comparative Study Of Two English Translations Of Chuan Xi Lu

Chuan Xi Lu is the representative work of Wang Yangming who is a famous philosopher in the Ming Dynasty. Up to now, there are just two English translation versions of Chuan Xi Lu, namely Henke’s and Wing-tsit Chan’s.On the basis of functional equivalence and foreignization and domestication translation strategies, this paper probes into the merits and demerits of the two English translations both linguistically and culturally under those research approaches such as exemplification, comparative analysis and comprehensive text analysis. The skopos of two translators is to transmit splendid Chinese culture and make the target readers have a deeper appreciation of their worth. Hence both of them employ foreignization translation strategy more often, and the domesticating translation serves as a complementary skill. At the aspects of lexis, sentence and rhetoric device, Henke makes many mistakes due to his insufficient competence of Chinese. He also deletes a lot of sections. By contrast, Chan’s translation more faithfully reproduces the source text from the perspective of language and culture. For Chinese culture-specific words, Chan adds footnotes to illustrate, which makes the target readers have a good understanding of Chinese culture.