A Study Of James Legge’s English Version Of Chuang Tzu From The Perspective Of Thick Translation

The present thesis attempts to analyze James Legge’s English version of Chuang Tzu from the perspective of thick translation,in the hope of contributing both to the more comprehensive examination of Legge’s translation and the enrichment of the theory of thick translation,and in a broader sense,to shed some new light on the translation and dissemination of ancient Chinese classics to the world.Chuang Tzu,a masterpiece in the history of Chinese philosophy and literature,has fascinated the minds of both Chinese and Western scholars and common readers.The English translations of Chuang Tzu have amounted to over a score in less than one and half a century.James Legge’s version is acknowledged to be one of the most authorative,by virtue of its fidelity to the original and meticulosity in providing extensive annotations and elaborate supplementary materials.However,few scholarly researches have examined this densely annotated and thickly presented translation.Thick translation,proposed by Kwame Anthony Appiah in 1993,is a translation method or strategy that seeks to locate the text in its rich cultural and linguistic context by the use of annotations and accompanying glosses.It is primarily an academic translation with the purpose of drawing the readers towards the original text and engendering in them a deeper understanding and genuine respect for the source language culture.The present study aims to clarify and reframe the notion of thick translation and,based on which,conduct a thorough analysis of James Legge’s English translation of Chuang Tzu.It adopts both descriptive and comparative approaches to investigating the manifestations and characteristics of thick translation in Legge’s version.Through a detailed text analysis and close examination,the thesis justifies that Legge’s version is a typical and fine example of "thick translation",as manifested in its extended preface and introduction,informative appendixes and indexes,as well as the copious amount of annotations and footnotes in the body text.And the characteristics of Legge’s translation are as follows:thick contextualization,the alien method of interpretation,full characterization of cultural details,and the accommodation of both similarities and differences between the source culture and target culture.These characteristics are in consistent with the strategic principles that thick translation proposes and advocates.Furthermore,the comparative study between James Legge’s and Fung Yu-lan’s translations demonstrates that the former fares better in maintaining the authenticity and preserving the literary qualities and cultural peculiarities of the original text.This further verifies the effectiveness of thick translation in compensating cultural losses and avoiding cultural distortion,thus bringing depth and breadth to the representation of the source culture.It is a strategy worth adopting in the translation of classical text like Chuang Tzu.