A Comparative Study Of Three English Versions Of The Analects Of Confucius From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

The Analects of Confucius is a classical work of Confucianism, which is also Chinese cultural treasure. Since ancient times, many cultured Chinese and foreigners translated it into many kinds of English versions for different purposes, who are missionaries, Sinologists, overseas Chinese and so on. In the process of translation they adopted different translation strategies and translation methods because of different translation purposes and time backgrounds. So this thesis selects three representatives to be half of these three kinds of translators, James Legge, Arthur Waley and Ku Hung-ming. At the same time there are many predecessors who studied with the Analects of Confucius English translation version(s), with a case study, comparative studies, or culturally- loaded words translation study and the study of translation strategies, such as domestication, foreignizaiton and hybridity etc.. However, studies from the perspectives of the purpose of translation and the translation strategies are relatively few. All of these studies haven’t been raised to a theoretical level. However, some scholars pay their attention on the study of English translation of the Analects of Confucius from the perspective of the translators’ subjective, hermeneutics, descriptive linguistics and systemic-functional linguistics. But there are a few studies on the translator’s purposes, the use of the translation version and the concrete translation methods adopted in the process of translation. What’s more, the researchers and scholars mainly focused on the translation versions of Pond’s, Roger T. Ames’ and D. C. Lau’s, so the study on the versions of James Legge’s, Ku Hung-ming’s, Arthur Waley’s is relative few. So far it hasn’t study on the contractive analysis of these three English versions.The Skopos theory is the core theory of the German Functional Translation Theory. It was born in the 1970, and has profound and great influence on the traditional studies. Before it appeared, the traditional translation took “equivalence” as the orientation, while German Functionalist School inclined to take translation purpose as the orientation and then did translation studies. Skopos theory thinks that the translation purpose is the determinant point of translation activities, and translation purpose guides translators to choose appropriate translation strategies and methods, then to carry translation activities, which can realize the established objective function of source language text in the target language context.The author of this thesis will attempt to study these three English versions from the perspective of German Functionalist Skopos Theory, and do analysis and contrast study of translation strategies. This thesis will use a case study, comparative analysis, interpretation, and illustration these four kinds of research methods. In this thesis, through the analysis and comparison, the author makes a conclusion that James Legge and Arthur Waley were mainly adopted foreignization translation strategy, while Ku Hung-ming mainly adopted the domestication translation strategy. However, during the concrete translation process they also used different methods of translation. The author will illustrate this phenomenon one by one. The conclusion is that translation strategies and translation methods they adopted are different because of their different backgrounds, different purposes of translation, and the different uses of translation versions. Regardless of what kind of translation strategies and translation methods they used, as long as the translator can achieve their intended purposes, then it can be said that the translation is successful. And the readers can select suitable versions to read, thus different works meet the different needs of different readers.With the development of China and the expansion of international influence, the outside world hopes to understand China through reading the Chinese classical books. At the same times, in recent years the study of Confucianism at home regenerates, so the retranslation of the Analects of Confucius and other Chinese classical books has been put on the agenda. From the perspective of Skopos Theory, the thesis studied the translation strategies of the Analects of Confucius and made a conclusion that in new era the retranslation of the Analects of Confucius should adopt different translation strategies and flexible methods according to the retranslation purposes so as to translate a high-quality version that is conformed to the requirements of the times.