A Study Of John Minford's English Translation Of Yi Jing From The Perspective Of Toury's Translation Norm Theory

Yi Jing,also known as I Ching or The Book of Changes,has been canonized as "the first among the Classics and the source of Taoism" since the ancient time.It is one of the most time-honored Chinese classics that were introduced to the West in the early time.In the 17th century,Yi Jing was first translated and introduced to western countries by Christian missionaries.Then,it was translated into various languages such as Latin,French,English,German,etc.and soon spread widely in Europe.The English translation of Yi Jing began in the 19th century.Since then,many scholars both from China and abroad have devoted themselves into the translation cause of Yi Jing and there have appeared several English versions of the classic,among which the latest one is John Minford's translation I Ching:The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Oracle and Book of Wisdom published by Viking Penguin in 2014.His translation has been highly praised since publication.Since the 1970s,translation studies has shifted gradually from the prescriptive approach to the descriptive approach.Deeply influenced by Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory,Gideon Toury put forward his renowned translation norm theory,which occupies a significant position in DTS.Translation is a social behavior.From the perspective of translation norm theory,translation activities are studied under the social-cultural polysystem of the target language so as to find out the social and cultural factors that affects translation activities as well as the norms that are observed by translators during the translation process.Based on Toury's translation norm theory,this thesis analyzes John Minford's English translation of Yi Jing,aiming at providing a new perspective for future researches on the English translation of Yi Jing and further offering some inspirations for the future English translation of the classic.The thesis mainly explores the impact of translation norms on John Minford during his translation process.By analyzing his translation,we have found that Minford was deeply influenced by translation norms.First,from the perspective of initial norm,Minford's translation tends to be more acceptable than adequate as he attached more importance to the readership.Then,from the perspective of preliminary norms,Minford selected Yi Jing mainly because of his profound interest in Chinese literature as well as Chinese culture.His translation is a direct translation in that there exists no intermediate language during his translation.Finally,from the perspective of operational norms,Minford's translation is an incomplete translation since he only translated the entire Zhou Yi,i.e.the ancient scripture of the sixty-four hexagrams,with some extracts from Yi Zhuan.In addition,he compiled those commentaries of ancient Chinese scholars included in Zhou Yi Zhe Zhong with commentaries of modern scholars,previous translators as well as that of his own,and he added these commentaries as annotations to his translation in order to make the elusive classic more accessible to the readers.During the translation,Minford employed different translation methods and techniques for the maintaining of the cultural features of Yi Jing,which fully demonstrates his solid mastery of both English and Chinese languages.