On English Translation Of Confucius Notions From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Lun Yu, a Chinese Bible by westerners, famous for the classic of Chinese Confucianism, is a masterpiece covering Confucius’s speeches and behaviors recorded by his students. As the representative Confucian concepts,仁、义、礼、知、信are the key notions this thesis chooses to analyze. Born in different time with distinct backgrounds, Legge and Waley viewed the translation of Lun Yu in different ways. Legge made attempts to transmit Chinese culture while Waley intended to make his translation of Lun Yu more acceptable and understandable. Study of translation of the five key notions in Lun Yu in this thesis is based on these two translation versions. The prototype of functionalist theory was put forward by Katharina Reiss in1971. Based on that, her student Hans J. Vermeer proposed skopos theory. The core idea is generated that translation strategy should be determined by translation purpose. Skopos theory gets free from the traditional source text centered thought. According to skopos theory, the adequate achievement of translator’s translation purpose instead of the simple pursuit of the form-equivalence with the source text is the most important. This thesis selects skopos theory as the theoretical support. The three rules of skopos theory, namely skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule are criteria when comparing translations of the key notions in the two versions.Ru Feng, Wang Dongbo both made researches on strategies adopted in different versions of Lun Yu from a macroscopic perspective. This thesis tries to compare and analyze translations of the five key notions in Legge’s and Waley’s translaiton versions of Lun Yu, from a relative microscopic layer.This thesis tries to analyze translation of the five Confucian terms仁、义、礼、知、信as well as sentences focusing on them in Legge’s and Waley’s translation versions of Lun Yu. It makes efforts to give an objective description of the respective translation strategies. Taking the three rules in skopos theory as the standard, similarities and differences are tried to be compared and analyzed in translation of the key notions in the two translation versions. This thesis intends to illustrate in what way translation purposes make influence on translation strtegies.Major findings of this thesis can be summarized as followings:Firstly, through the comparison and analysis of the key notions translated in the two versions, it can be proved that translation is not an imitative activity of word for word transference. In the process of translation, a lot of multiple personal and cultural factors should be taken into consideration. Among them, skopos, namely purpose plays the most important role. Secondly, through the comparison and analysis of the key notions translated in the two versions, it can be summarized that translation cannot be measured only by the equivalence with the source text, other elements such as translators’ purposes and translator’s own comprehension of the source text should be taken into consideration. Last but not the least, the five key notions analyzed in this thesis have culture-specificity to some extent. The comprehension and expression of them is still a problem. For example, distortion exists in the two versions’ translation of“太庙”and Waley’s interpretation of the phrase“法语”...