Changes In Translation Strategies Under The Ideological Influence-From Ku Hung-ming To D.C.LAU

In the present, countries are facing more and more fierce compitations in the cultrual field. Introducing Chinese culture to other countries to strenghen China’s cultural influence becomes an urgent task.As one of the most representative works of Chinese classics, Lun Yu has been playing an important role both at home and abroad, so has its translation. Reading Lun Yu is taken as an effective way to know China by foreign readers, which makes its translations and translation studies very important.So far, a large amount of researches have been done on the English versions of Lun Yu, but few of them have compared Ku Hung-ming’s version with D. C. Lau’s from the perspective of ideology. Both Ku’s and Lau’s versions enjoyed great popularity among foreign readers and made great contributions to the transmission of Chinese culture. However, due to the influences of different ideologies at their times, Ku’s main translation strategy was different from Lau’s, resulting in two different versions with distinctive features. This thesis aims at exploring how the social and individual ideologies took effect when Ku and Lau were rendering Lun Yu.Therefore, the author of this thesis conducts a comparative study on Ku’s and Lau’s versions of Lun Yu under the theoretical framework of ideology. Based on the comparison, the author discusses how both social and individual ideologies exert influences on the choice of translation strategies and makes a rough prediction of the trend of strategy choosing when translators are rendering Chinese classics in the new era.At last, it is found out that both social and individual ideologies influence translators’ choices of translation strategies greatly, and Ku Hung-ming mainly chose domestication when rendering Lun Yu, while D. C. Lau mainly chose foreignization. Under the influence of the present social ideology, translators may tend to adopt foreignization when they translating Chinese classics.