A Comparative Study Of The English Versions Of Mencius From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

Mencius has been translated into many languages and spread to the West from the Ming and Qing Dynasties,which has become a window for the West to understand Chinese culture.Even to this day,translation of Mencius is still unabated,and its new English versions are presented to the public one after another,which shows that the profound ideological and cultural heritage of Mencius still has great appeal to the West.Translation of Mencius continues to play a major part in the Chinese-western cultural exchange.The version of Mencius translated by Irene Bloom is relatively new and has not received much attention and research in the academia.And the version of Mencius translated by D.C.Lau,with both scholarship and readability,is regarded as a model of translation of the Chinese classics because of his superb English attainments and profound knowledge of Chinese culture.Based on Nida's functional equivalence theory,this study mainly adopts the method of textual analysis,selects representative translation examples to comparatively analyze the two English versions of Mencius on linguistic and cultural levels.On the linguistic level,it mainly expounds whether and how the two versions achieve the functional equivalence with the original from the translation of word,syntax,meaning and style.On the cultural level,this study makes an analysis of the two versions from their understanding and translation of culture-bound terms including material culture,institutional culture and social culture as well as Mencius' s thought of Xing Shan and core notions of Ren and Yi so as to examine whether the two versions appropriately convey the cultural information of the original and explain how they accurately reflect the ideological and cultural connotation of the original in translation.This study concludes that Bloom's version of Mencius is somewhat inferior to Lau's translation in most cases,but its excellent translation in some cases cannot be denied and ignored.The author holds that Bloom's version of Mencius is still worthy of the attention and research of the academia and readers in order to exert its cultural value and carry forward Confucian thought and culture.