On The English Translations Of Tao Te Ching: From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

Significant changes have taken place within translation studies in Western countries since 1970s. Translation study started to take wider situation and social-cultural context into account rather than be restricted in the circle of pure text, which is referred to as "cultural turn of translation studies". Andre Lefevere advanced manipulation theory during that time. He adopted the mode of cultural studies and introduced social, political and cultural factors outside the literary system into translation studies. He believed that translation cannot be done in a vacuum and all translation problems cannot be solved only in linguistic ways. All in all, any translation activity is influenced and manipulated by the target mainstream ideology and poetics in specific social, historical and cultural contexts, which is the violent manipulation and rewriting of the original.With profound philosophical spirit and succinct language style, Tao Te Ching is praised as the representative of Eastern wisdom and draws huge attention both at home and abroad. There have been almost 200 English translation versions of Tao Te Ching since 1868 when the first English translation version was released.Based on Lefevere’s manipulation theory and illustrated with the case study of five English translation versions of Tao Te Ching, this thesis intends to probe into how manipulative factors constrained different translators’ translation strategies of Tao Te Ching in different periods.This thesis is composed of six chapters:Chapter One is a brief introduction that contains the research background, significance, hypothesis, methodology and the layout.Chapter Two brings a literature review of manipulation theory and the research of English translations of Tao Te Ching.Chapter Three discusses the origin of manipulation theory and especially Lefevere’s manipulation theory from the perspective of ideology, poetics and patronage. It provides the theoretical basis of this thesis.Chapter Four presents detailed information about Lao-tzu and Tao Te Ching as well as five translators and their versions.Chapter Five conducts a comparative study of five English translation versions from three factors of manipulation theory. Examples and detailed analyses will be offered respectively in order to illustrate the influence of the manipulation theory on translation in this chapter. Corpus linguistics is applied to show general characters of different versions.Chapter Six draws a comprehensive conclusion of the thesis.Through comparison this thesis attempts to demonstrate the applicability of manipulation theory in the study of literature translation. It is intended to study translation in a social-cultural environment and provide convincible explanation to the diversity of translation. In addition, the manipulation theory cannot only offer a persuasive explanation for the translation strategies of Tao Te Ching and deepen understanding of Western and Chinese culture differences, but also can provide advices on future translation practice of Tao Te Ching.