Back-Translation Of Legge's Shoo King Under The Guidance Of Reiss's Text Typology Theory

The translation material of this report is Shoo King,or Shangshu,which is excerpted from Sacred Book of the East written by British missionary James Legge(1815-1897),a famous British Sinologist in the 19th century.He was the first person to systematically study and to translate ancient Chinese classics.James Legge's Shoo King has 58 chapters,with long introductions and rich annotations.Legge's translation of Shoo King is an important academic result and opens up new ways for translation Chinese classical documents.Like other ancient Chinese classics translated by him,Shoo King has also become a classical translation for Western world to understand Chinese ancient culture.Although there are many vernacular versions of Shangshu,they are translated from the ancient Chinese version.Besides,the research text of this translation report is Legge's Shoo King instead of the Chinese Confucian Classic ShangShu.There has not been any back-translation version of James Legge's Shoo King so far.Back Translation is a process to translate a document which has already been translated into a foreign language back into the original language.It is generally divided into three types:back translation for testing,back translation for research,and mechanical back translation.In this translation report,it is mainly for research.This back-translation practice is different from general back-translation.The author of the report translated not only the text proper,but also the annotations and introductions,which is useful for better understanding the text proper.Legge's translation of Shangshu consists of five chapters:The Book of Thang,The Book of Yu,The Book of Hsia,The Book of Shang and The Book of Kau.The author translated,under the guidance of Reiss's Text Typology,the first three parts with a total length of about 12000 words.Aiming at specific features of different source texts,Reiss's Text Typology Theory provides a series of practical methods for translation.Shangshu contains texts of various literary genres such as "canon","counsel","speech","tribute","announcement","instruction" and so on.In other words,it is not a book of a single text type.What is more,different text types such as monologues and dialogues,narratives and descriptions can be found even in one chapter of a single piece.The author of the report illustrates Reiss's Text Typology Theory,and points out its guiding significance by showing case studies.