A Cognitive View On The Translation Of Core Confucian Terms In Shi Ji

ince China’s increasingly strong national power and flourishing economy in recentyears,more and more foreigners have paid closer attention to Chinese culture.Accordingly,it becomes significant and urgent to translate works bearing profound Chinese culture owing to their strong desire to get to know this nation.As one of the most important Chinese classics,Shi Ji is regarded as an encyclopedic historical record,because it not only records famous historical figures,but also a representative of the essence of Chinese culture.Considering that,this thesis aims to study the core Confucian terms in Shi Ji.The corpus built in this study bases on three major English translations of Shi Ji,namely Records of the Grand Historian translated by Burton Watson,The Grand Scribe’s Records by William H.Nienhauser,Jr,and Yang Hsienyi’s translation.By extracting and analyzing the Chinese and English versions of core Confucian terms in Shi Ji,the study aims to explore appropriate translation methods for translating culturally loaded terms in Chinese classics.The thesis adopts both corpus-based qualitative methods,as well as comparative analysis to conduct the research by building a bilingual corpus.The five core Confucian terms selected for the study are Ren,Yi,Li,Zhi and Xin,which bear profound cultural background in varied aspects and are also the exact components of Five Constant Virtues.Thus,the research can guarantee the validity,integrity and unity of the corpus.Moreover,the extraction of the five terms’ Chinese and English versions covers all sentences containing Ren,Yi,Li,Zhi and Xin in Shi Ji.What’s more,this thesis provides a comprehensive explanation of the connotations of five core Confucian terms integrated with their meanings in Shi Ji.The analysis and comparison of the three translated versions are carried out in accordance with frame theory.As a result,four translation methods,namely generalized translation,explanatory translation,cultural equivalence and functional equivalence,are summarized,among which,cultural equivalence is the most frequently adopted method,then are explanatory translation and functional translation,the least applied method is generalized translation.Another finding of the study is that,despite the fact that the first three main translation methods can successfully manifest the specific meanings of the five Confucian terms in target text,the influences of them on target reader’s cognition vary.Cultural equivalence method and explanatory translation method basically can realize the rebuilding ofcognitive frame or cognitive shift in target texts.In contrast,functional equivalence method may fail to do so owing to in-equivalence of cognitive frames at both languages and certain loss of terms’ cultural background and connotations in the process of translation.