Comparative Research Of Bible Translation Into Chinese And Russian

Bible is not only the Christian scriptures but also an all-inclusive all-embracingencyclopedia. It is an important source of western culture. It has been translated into manylanguages. Bible has a long history and a large number of distribution in the world. It iswidely accepted by readers. Bible has such a far-reaching effect on all kinds of peoples that ithas been regarded as a standard religious work with high historical and cultural value.Although there are a great number of books on the study of bible, few has been focusedon the comparison between the translated versions in Chinese and Russian. This kind ofresearch is in this sense meaningful and worth doing. Based on linguistics as framework foranalysis, this paper compared the translated versions of Bible in Chinese and Russian. Thiscomparative study of involves the history of the Chinese and Russian translation of Bible, thetranslation strategies and translation methods used by translators. The paper presents thecomparative analysis of the translated versions of Bible in Chinese and Russian fromdiachronic, synchronic and macro perspectives. The study showed that there are differences intranslating religious scriptures between Chinese and Russian translators. These differencesand historic and cultural backgrounds. The comparative analysis of the translation theoriesand principles used by Chinese and Russian translators at different historical stages and thecomparative analysis of the translation strategies and techniques used in translating specificculture-loaded words in the New Testament also showed that Chinese and Russian translatorsmay have used foreignzing method, normalization method, and literal translation and freetranslation in translating Bible into their own languages. The use of these translation methodsand techniques helped to achieve the goal of spreading the Christian culture and making thetranslated versions of Bible easily understood by readers.At the end of the paper, it points out that this kind of comparative study of the translatedversions of Bible in Chinese and Russian is helpful for cross-cultural communication betweenChina and Russia. It will also provide some implications for the translation of religiousscriptures.