A Study On The Translation Strategies Of Wushu Texts

Studies on translations related to Wushu have been less than systematic,academic or theoretical so far.This thesis reviews the history of dissemination and translation of Wushu since 1949,followed by a case study of translated Taijiquan classics.The history falls into three distinctive phases: the preliminary period(1949–1978),the rapid growth(1978–1999)and the booming development(2000–present).During the first period,overseas Chinese,especially Kungfu masters,were doing the translation of Wushu with a view to introducing a particular school or style of Wushu together with its techniques of boxing.They made their translations easily understandable to their target audience by removing the cultural peculiarity.The strategies employed in the first period were inherited in the second one but pinyin was the favored method for transliterating Chinese characters.The two decades in the second period witnessed the booming of Wushu translation,including glossaries,competition rules,teaching materials,and monographs.In the third stage,the translation strategy has undergone a shift from the dominant domestication to the combined use of approaches of domestication and foreignization,which leads to a sharp rise in translated works with improved quality and increasingly profound connotations of Chinese culture.The case study of the translations of “Taijiquan Lun” by Louis Swaim and Waysun Liao shows in what way is the style of translation related to translators' backgrounds.Swaim,Masters of Chinese History and Ancient Chinese,keeps the foreignness of the source language and the spirit and virtue of Wushu by for example transliterating the Chinese characters in pinyin.In comparison,Liao,a martial arts master,adopts a transparent,fluent style to explain the techniques and training methods.He makes his translated text as readable as possible by adding further information.In the new era,Wushu embarks on a new journey of the dissemination of Chinese culture.Therefore,foreignization should be the preferred strategy,through which,the target readers will get to know a new culture and the characteristics of Chinese Wushu,without,however,going to extremes.