Use Of Parallel Texts In The Translation Of The Dynamics Of Masters Literature

This is a report on the Chinese translation of an excerpted chapter from the book The Dynamics of Masters Literature. The book is written in English, by Wiebke Denecke, a German scholar teaching in Boston University, who is interested in comparisons of early thoughts and traditions of philosophy. In this book, she gives the corpus from Confucius to Han Feizi a new category of discipline, i.e., Masters Literature, and makes the book a typical representative of the studies on Masters Literature after the excavation of Mawangdui materials and Guodian manuscripts. It serves as a good reference for any further study on Masters Literature for both domestic and foreign scholars and researchers.The excerpted chapter is a study of Laozi, in which Wiebke Denecke gives a good illustration of the dynamics between Laozi and other master's texts and the strategies Laozi adopts to create a completely unprecedented intellectual niche instead of talking back with its rival opponents of Warring States.The studies on Masters Literature have been, for a long time confined to the sinologists and Chinese experts studying China's history, ancient Chinese literature, or philosophy, because of the difficulty in understanding ancient Chinese classics. Inspired by the popularity of the studies on Masters Literature in China since last decade, the writer of this report aims to talk about the building of parallel corpora and its role in translating Chinese books on studies of Masters Literature, and further introducing ancient Chinese classics to western countries as an important form of cultural exportation.Based on a report on the process of completing the translation task using CAT tools, the writer displays his findings about the scarcity of bi-text studies on Masters Literature, the use of parallel text of online resources in translating the sinologists' names, and the difficulties in finding proper equivalents for the terms on philosophy and linguistics that are used to talk about Masters Literature.The report comes to a natural conclusion by attaching importance to the building of parallel corpora of Masters Literature.