A Comparative Study Of English Translations Of Mencius

As an important carrier of the Chinese traditional culture, Mencius is the cultural treasure and a symbol of the Chinese world and culture. It attracts many scholars’ attention. Mencius records Mencius’ words and thoughts in details. Its English translation began in the 1920s by foreign missionaries, rather late in Hong Kong and the mainland till 1970s. But the research on English translations studies started around the middle of the 20th century. Research topics mainly focused on the translation features, English translations of Mencius’ philosophical views and translators studies Although Mencius’ economic views have made great influence in the history, the relevant research is far more enough.This paper takes three English versions of Mencius James Legge’ The Four Books, Din Cheuk Lau’s Mencius, and Library of Chinese Classics’s Mencius as three representative cases, aiming to investigating and describing the differences of English translations under different cultural, historical and social frameworks. And the study employs the cultural translation theory proposed by Bassnett as the theoretical tool and the descriptive translation studies as the research method. The paper compared and discussed English translations of six economic topics, including "anti-monopoly", "price of product", "labor products exchange", "people’s living", "tax", and "land system" respectively. The paper argues that although translational differences are shown in the way of linguistics, they are caused by translators’ cultural background, translation traditions, translators’ living surroundings, translators’interpretation of Mencius and translation objectives, etc. The translation strategy and methods translators use gives the English translation of Mencius experience.