Comparative Studies On The Translation Of Core Concepts In Different English Versions Of The Analects

The Analects, as one of the most influential classics of the Confucianism, is compiled by Confucius’disciples. It has recorded their words and deeds and has embodied the political ideas, logic thinking, moralvalues and educational principles of Confucius. As a valuable part of Chinese traditional culture, TheAnalects has deeply influenced the thought and culture of Chinese. It has been translated to multiplewestern languages since the end of16thcentury, in which the English versions are numerous with theamount of over twenty versions.The Analects contains over12thousand Chinese words. And according to concordance, the word“ren”(仁) appears109times, the word “junzi”(君子) appears107times, and the word “li”(礼) appears74times. As the key words and core concepts of The Analects, the three words have been explained in manychapters of The Analects and many scholars have discussed the connotations of them. The ideology ofConfucius is based on the core of “ren”(仁), requires “li”(礼), and guides people to be a respectable“junzi”(君子). This thesis selects three famous English versions of The Analects: James Legge’s, KuHungming’s and Pan Fuen&Wen Shaoxia’s version. Through the establishment of English-Chineseparallel corpus, the thesis searches and analyzes the translations of ren (仁), li (礼), and junzi (君子) by themethods of documentary and case study. And it will try to figure out the reason of the differences by usingsome related translation theories.The thesis can be divided into six parts. The first part is the introduction, which includes thebackground of the research, aims and significance of the research, the problems of the research, and thestructure of the thesis. The second part is literature review, which introduces The Analects and its threeEnglish versions, the former study of the translation of its key words, and some basic knowledge ofCorpus—based Translation Studies. The third part is research tools and methodology. The fourth part is thefindings, which contains the analysis of the translations of those key words. The fifth part is discussion,talking about the reasons of the differences. The sixth part is conclusion.This thesis analyzes the three different explanations of the core concepts of The Analects in the threeEnglish versions and aims to contribute to the translation and research of The Analects in the future.