Cultural Transposition In Translating Confucian Terms In Shi Ji And Han Shu

Translation does not involve the transformation of language only. It entails the transmission of culture. Canon translation plays an important role in the spread of Chinese culture, while the translation of cultural terms has always been a significant issue in canon translation studies. An important standard for successful translation is whether the source cultural information can be faithfully transferred and whether the translation is easy for the target readers to understand.As a splendid part of Chinese traditional culture, Confucianism has attracted the attention of scholars all over the world, and the Confucian classics have been translated into various languages. However, the study on Confucianism is limited to Confucian classics, such. as The Analects, Mencius, The Golden Mean, etc., while the Confucian thoughts embodied in other texts gain much less attention., such as Shi Ji and Han Shu.In this paper, the two translation versions of Shi Ji by Burton Watson and by William H. Nienhauser, Jr. and the two translation versions of Han Shu by Homer H. Dubs and by Burton Watson are adopted as the corpus, from which the Confucian terms and their translation have been sorted out to build a Chinese-English Confucian glossary for Shi Ji and Han Shu. This thesis aims to explore how the cultural information of Confucian terms in Shi Ji and Han Shu is transmitted from the perspective of cultural transposition. It is found that a single Confucian term can hardly correspond to a proper single English expression due to its rich connotations; and the translators are inclined to adopted similar translation strategies but use different target language expressions, which reflects the different characteristics of their translations.