Strategies For Translating Buddhist Words In Journey To The West:a Contrastive Study

Journey to the West is one of the Four Classic Novels of ancient Chinese literature, and enjoys a high reputation both in China and abroad. Journey to the West is rich in cultural content, especially with regard to the many concepts of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism and their lexical expression. The underlying cultural meanings that are manifested in these religious words are quite different than those of Western culture, creating numerous problems when translating the entire text of Journey to the West into English. In order to solve these translation problems, a translator must employ different translation strategies. The focus of this thesis is to extend the discussion of the problems related to the translation of Buddhist words in two English translations of Journey to the West by carrying out a contrastive analysis of specific translation strategies employed in the translation of Buddhist words. Through a contrastive textual analysis, the author describes and analyzes the different translation strategies employed by the English translators of Journey to the West. This description and analysis is followed by a discussion and evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of specific translation strategies.Although there are many English translations of Journey to the West, the vast majority of them are abridged translations; at present, there are only two full English translations. One version is translated by William Jenner, and the other is translated Anthony C. Yu. In light of the fact that abridged translations often omit much information found in the source text, the author has only selected Jenner and Yu’s translations for contrastive analysis. This choice was made to achieve a more comprehensive analysis.This thesis uses the conceptr oftranslation strategies as described by Mona Baker to analyze the differences between the strategies employed in the translation of Buddhist words by Jenner and Yu. In order to achieve a more comprehensive analysis of the English translations of Buddhist words in the two versions, the author employs a parallel corpus and electronic book search for data gathering and analysis purposes. First, the author refers to relevant research literature in order to categorize the Buddhist words in Journey to the West. Next, the author examines how the translators deal with specific instances of these different categories of Buddhist words. Finally, this data is summarized by describing each translator’s unique characteristics and preferred strategies. Through this research, the author has found that both translators use five basic strategies:cultural substitution, paraphrasing, omission, transliteration/using loan words and using more specific words. However, the translators employ these strategies with different frequencies. At the same time, the author also analyzed and compared the specific translation strategies employed in the translation of different categories of Buddhist words. A particularly significant factor affecting translation strategies is the category of the Buddhist word to be translated. If the word in question is a Sanskrit transliteration, the translators will usually use the Sanskrit transliteration in the target text. By contrast, if the word in question is a freely translated word, the translators will not typically employ transliteration. However, when Yu translates freely translated Buddhist words, he uses the loan word/transliteration strategy more than Jenner does. When translating Sanskrit-Chinese compound words, the translators typically use some sort of paraphrasing; however, Yu tends to use more formal religious words in addition maintaining the original structure of the compound more often than Jenner does. When translating Chinese words that have acquired a Buddhist connotation, the translators typically use paraphrasing as well, but Yu again selects more formal vocabulary.Through the comparison and analysis of actual examples of Buddhist vocabulary in English translations of Journey to the West,the author has come to the conclusion that Yu’s translation is the more successful version. The advantages of Yu’s translation are as follows. First, he uses more transliteration than Jenner, and provides more annotations to maintain the foreign character of the text while also making potentially unfamiliar words understandable to the reader. Second, Yu is more consistent in his translations. Third, he uses more appropriate professional vocabulary. Finally, he tends to maintain the structure of compound words. These differences could be attributed to the different academic backgrounds of the two translators. Yu is a scholar of literature and religion, whereas Jenner is a Sinologist. Their choice of translation strategies may have been influenced by their academic backgrounds.Additionally, the author believes that a more comprehensive analysis of translation strategies can only be achieved through the collection and analysis of a large amount of corpus data. An analysis of the strategies that a translator tends to use cannot be done through over-generalization based on a small number of selected examples. Due to limitations of time and energy, the author of this thesis has only made initial inquires based on this idea, meaning that this study has its limitations. Going forward, the author hopes that there will be deeper, more comprehensive research based on Chinese-English parallel corpus data.