| Tao Te Ching, as the earliest philosophical masterpiece in China, has profound influence on Chinese traditional culture, ancient politics, philosophy, military affairs,literature and art, and normal people’s daily life, as well as national spirits over thousands of years. And globally, Tao Te Ching has stimulated the interest of many foreign philosophers, politicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs. It is has been translated into many foreign languages such as English, French, German, Italian,Spanish, Japanese and so on. Besides, it is the most widely translated text second to the Bible. Its popularity has inspired lots of scholars and researchers home and abroad to study it and its translated versions. In this thesis, the author makes a comparative analysis of three different translated texts of Tao Te Ching based on the theory of Cultural Schema.Cultural Schema, as a branch of schema theory, is a mental structure concerning culture, which enables an individual to store perceptual and conceptual information on his or her culture and make interpretations of cultural experiences. Therefore, the cultural schema which has been formed in a translator’s mind directly influences his/her strategies to deal with culture-loaded words and phrases. As a translator, he or she who has gotten better understanding of the cultural schema of source language,can help him or her find an corresponding cultural word in target language when dealing with cultural schema equivalence, and build new schema when confronted with cultural schema default or conflict, so as to assist target readers to activate or adjust the schema that translation forms in their heads.Such factors including huge time spans, abstruse and mystery philosophy, as well as the differences of language characters and culture between source language and target language, bring various difficulties to the translation of Tao Te Ching. The culture-loaded words and phrases in the masterpiece, as units carrying the unique cultural connotation, on one hand, embody Warring state period’s culture characteristics, including ecology, materials, society, religion, and so on; on the other hand, bring difficulties to modern-time readers, foreign-language readers especially,to understand the master piece. Correctly paraphrasing and translating culture-loaded words of Tao Te Ching matters a lot to spread traditional Chinese culture and fill theculture gap between different cultures. Cultural schema just emphasizes background knowledge concerning with culture that human beings own.Based on a quantity of books and papers on Tao Te Ching and Cultural Schema,the author lists his purpose of the research and made summaries of Tao Te Ching and its studies, as well as studies of cultural schema. Then he selects a dozen of culture-loaded words and phrases from the three translated versions of Tao Te Ching,and classifies them into three groups according to the cultural schema equivalence,cultural schema default, and cultural schema conflict between Chinese and English culture. The author analyses the three translators’ means to deal with culture-loaded words and phrases they had met with from the perspective of cultural schema theory.The author intends to find out which strategies are better to deal with culture-loaded words and help target readers understand the ancient masterpiece. From the comparison and analysis, the author obtains that all the three translators used literal translation, free translation and transliteration. Moreover, Waley and Gu also applied annotation to provide further explanations of culture-loaded words to target readers.In the author’s opinion, with an annotation, literal translation and transliteration can help form correspondence in translation, and give better explanation of culture-loaded words to readers, as annotation is free from form and length limit.Due to the limitation of time and the author’s knowledge, the thesis just makes analysis from a few examples. Therefore, the conclusion may be limited. |
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