| Tao Te Ching,serving as the most representative Chinese classic works,was created by our great thinker Lao Tuz living in the ancient Era of Spring and Fall.The whole book consists of eighty-one chapters,divided into two parts titled Tao Ching and Te Ching,covering the ethnical,philosophical,political,and celestial values that can be further show how to self-cultivate,govern the nation,train the army,and keep healthy,thus producing a profound and far-reaching influences on the development of our domestic philosophy,politics,religion,mind,and culture.Regarded as an important bond with the domestic culture succession and overseas culture dissemination,the Chinese Classics is playing a significant role in the current strategy of letting our Chinese culture go abroad.There is no denying that the dissemination of the Chinese Classics can’t be accomplished without cross-language translations.Despite the sparse words,Tao Te Ching is simple and refined in dictions,parallel in sentences,abundant in rhetoric(couplets,parallelism,pun,metaphor etc.)and rhyme,overflown with poetic feelings,easy to read at a strong pace and pass by word of mouth,which is why scholars from home and abroad have been showing great passion for it for centuries.Since the publication of Tao Te Ching,it has been successively translated into approximately thirty foreign languages,whose translation versions have reached more than one thousand copies,second to those of Bible,occupying at the top of the foreign translations of the Chinese Classics.Based on the perspective of sociological translation studies,the study adopts the corpus approach to make a comparison and analysis of the most representative English translation version of Tao Te Ching from James Legge,Thomas Waley,Xu Yuanchong,Gu Zhengkun.The purpose of the thesis is aiming to figure out the following questions.1)What are the primary disparities of translators’ styles at the level of words,phrases,and sentences based on corpus study in the four English translation versions of Tao Te Ching? 2)What are exterior factors that lead to the disparities of translators’ styles in terms of “field” and “capital”based on the sociological translation study? 3)How these exterior factors further influence the translators’ choice of translation strategies and techniques from the perspective of “habitus”? Firstly,the thesis adopted the corpus-based approach to make a comparative analysis of the language features of the four translation versions of Tao Te Ching at the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels,aiming to explore the influences of the era the translator lives in,the nationality of the translator,and translator’s identity on the translation style and further reveal the language styles of different versions.The findings are as follows: 1)The language features of the four versions are disparate,with the Chinese translators using words and expressions with great simplicity and adopting the combination of literary translation and free translation as well as transliteration which can help spread the Chinese culture to the western readers.2)Influenced by the translator identity,the western translators,on the one hand,greatly affected by their mother tongue language use rich words,complex sentence and adopt the literary translations and one the other hand is low in accuracy of translations for lack of a good understanding of the Chinese culture.3)It is Xu Yuanchong’s version that better satisfies the simplicity of the source text at the lexical and the syntactic levels and it is Xu Yuanchong that can use the strategies of free translation and domestication to simply spread the culture-loaded words rich in Chinese culture to the western readers at the level of content.In addition,since the translation activity in nature is a social practical activity instead of a pure language transfer,the study of translation should be considered in combination of sociology.Since the1990 s,Bourdieu’s sociology has injected a new vitality into the translation field and further widely applied the sociology into the translation studies.Therefore,the thesis,after identifying the differences of the four versions based on the corpus approach,use the Bourdieu’s sociological translation studies as a perspective to explore the causes and effects of these differences.At first,the thesis explores the relationship between the “translation field” and “the power field” of the four translators upon the completion of the translations.Then the thesis explores the “capitals” that the four translators are equipped with during the process of translation in terms of society,economy,culture and the“symbolic capitals” generated afterwards.At last,the thesis summarizes the translation habitus that are formed in the process of the four translators’ long time of translation practice and the influences of these habitus on the translators’ choice of the translation skills and strategies.According to the study,the “field” of the translator has a great influence on the translation purpose,and the “field” and “capital” further make a difference to the translator’s habitus of translation,and in turn the habitus again have a huge impact on the translator’s choices of the translation techniques and strategies.Due to the four translators’ space,tools,and logic differences in the social practice,the four translators form different habitus under the influences of different “fields” and “capitals”.Meanwhile,the four translator’s different habitus also mirror their unique translation thoughts,and further determine their cautious choices of the translation techniques and strategies,but also reflect the different needs in different eras and societies,which eventually lead to multiple translator styles and various readers’ reading habits.In general,the translation field of the westerners is intervened by Christianity,aiming to better spread the Christianity gospel after a better understanding of the Chinese traditional culture and mind.However,the translation field of the Chinese translators is intervened by literary,aiming to strengthen the acceptability of our Chinese culture in the western countries and promoting the Chinese culture to better go abroad.Therefore,the western translators profile the symbolic capitals while translators from home profile cultural capitals.The professional translation habits of western translators are apt to focus on foreignization and addition and thus can better stay faithful to the source text while the reader-oriented Chinese translators focus on the readability and fluency of the translated versions with an inclination for domestication and a mixture of addition and deletion.Eventually,the thesis applies the combination of quantitative description and qualitative analysis to the study of the English translation versions of the Tao Te Ching,which can not only realize the integration and the complementation of the language methods and the sociological theories,but also make the research results serve as the powerful reference for the “letting the Chinese culture out” strategy. |
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