| Confucius is a great ideologist, educator and politician at the late Spring and Autumn Period.He is not only the founder of Confucianism and representative of the Confucian school, but also one of the influential pundits at that time. Confucianism has a profound impact on China, the Asian Confucian culture and even the whole world.As one of the Confucian classics, The Analects, which is a centralized realization of Chinese traditional culture, recorded the words and deeds of the great thinker Confucius as well as his disciples between the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Period. It is a collection of prose in quotation style which includes twenty chapters.As is known, from the late 16 th century and early 17 th century numerous English versions have appeared. Up till now, there are more than 60 English versions of The Analects including abridged version translation. Although there are a number of English translations, the study of translation is relatively lagging behind.Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics provides a practical analytical framework for discourse analysis. As the latest inheritance and development of SFL, Appraisal Theory is at the level of discourse semantics to analyze interpersonal meaning. The above two theories are integrated to form a more comprehensive analytical framework for this study. The annotation tool Tree Tagger3 is used to tag. The corpus software BFSU PowerConc is used to retrieve and analyze together with Log likelihood. Quantitative and qualitative analysis methods are applied to study The Analects of Arthur Waley’s and D. C. Lau’s translation. The similarities and differences of realization of modal responsibility are summarized to make a contrast in the discourse of the two English versions. Furthermore, the reasons of the differences between them will be discussed as detail as possible.The results show that even though both translators employ the realizations of modal responsibility, they have different modal expressive preference. In each of the translations of The Analects by Arthur Waley and D. C. Lau, high, median and low the three kinds of modal responsibility are respectively reflected in the two versions, which include:(1) High modal responsibility: high value modal operators, explicit subjective orientation;(2) Median modal responsibility: median value modal operators, implicit subjective orientation and implicit objective orientation;(3) Low modal responsibility: low value modal operators, explicit objective orientation. On the other hand, the realizations in both versions, which is either inclined towards high modal responsibility or low modal responsibility, are reflected in contraction and expansion of the Engagement system. Modal operators, modal adjuncts,psychological verbs and the negative forms appear more in Waley’s version to realize modal responsibility. But D. C. Lau would like to use the adjective phrases, passive voice and the structure of “there be…” to show modal responsibility in his version. Overall, when translating the Analetcs, Waley tends to take high modal responsibility, whereas D. C. Lau takes translating strategies to avoid responsibility and shows low modal responsibility.The present study tries to explore the Chinese and western translator’s expressions of modal responsibility for The Analects within the framework of SFL, which provides a new theoretical perspective to the research of The Analects as well as the interpretation of other Chinese classics.It also contributes to promoting the focus on the translation of The Analects on linguistics. In addition, the analysis of modal responsibility enlarges the range of applications of SFL, which helps ideology in discourse be discussed more deeply. Meanwhile it also offers some useful implications for applications about the ancient Chinese translation. |
PDF Full Text Request