Influence Of Ideology On Translation

Zhongyong, as a classic Confucian book, is a marvelous treatise in Chinese intellectual history. Early in the 16 th century, it was first translated and transmitted to Europe by European missionaries. Since then, Zhongyong had been widely translated and studied in Britain and America. Therefore, the study of representative English versions of Zhongyong is of great significance for the translation of Chinese classics in the context of globalization. In the 19 th century, James Legge, the British sinologist and missionary, was the first to translate the Chinese Classics in a systemic way. His English version of Zhongyong is held to be the standard version in the west. At the very beginning of the 21 th century, Roger. T. Ames, the American sinologist and philosopher, produced a subversive translation together with David. L. Hall. Taking Legge’s translation and Ames’ s translation as the object of study, this thesis aims to do a qualitative study of the two English versions from the ideological perspective.Since the cultural turn in translation studies, the central issues have been shifted from the traditional debate such as “faithfulness” and “equivalence” of the translated text to more comprehensive factors. Therefore, translation can be studied in a larger social, cultural and historical context. Instead of focusing on the traditional issues concerning faithfulness and equivalence of the translated text, Lefevere’ theory helps us locate the subject of translation studies at the macro level. Since different translated versions of the same source text may be produced in different contexts, the judging criteria are no longer the same. Any translation produced in a given time has its significance, so we have to justify the different translations of the same source text according to the specific constraints under which they are produced. Ideology, in Lefevere’s rewriting theory, plays a decisive role. Ideology influences both the choice of the source text and the translation strategy to be employed. Thus, studying the ideological factor in translation can help us understand how the original text is understood and produced in a certain society at a certain time.From the ideological perspective, the thesis investigates the ideological backgrounds of two English versions of Zhongyong at a macro level and manifestations of ideological influences on the translated texts at a micro level. Due to the differences of social ideology and the translator’ ideology, translators’ understandings and translations of Zhongyong are different. Both social ideology and the translator’s ideology exert influences on the two versions to different degrees, the latter playing the dominant role. Legge’s translation was to better help future missionaries preach Christianity to adhere to the previous missionary tradition. In the 19 th century, Zhu Xi’ annotations of Confucian works were held to be the authoritative editions. Therefore, his Supplemental Remarks upon the Four Books was mainly taken as the original text. The authority of the original book and Legge’s rigorous academic training made Legge translate Zhongyong in an exegetic way. In order to faithfully convey the original ideas, his translation is abundant in annotations and notes, thus his translation is labeled as “scholarly translation”. However, he based his understanding and interpretation of Zhongyong on Christian doctrines; therefore, Christian ideology threaded his thorough translation. The end of the 20 th century witnessed the heyday of translating Confucian classics in America. Ames’ collaborate translation with Hall was produced in this period, aiming to create a dialogue between Chinese philosophy and western philosophy. They contended that Zhongyong was an important philosophical book reflecting correlative cosmology. Hence, they set a philosophical framework to translate it as a way of getting rid of the traditional Christianized translation and the interpretation under the framework of western philosophy. Nevertheless, under the influence of the ideology of process philosophy, overtranslation appeared in their translation as a result of the excessive interpretation and translation from the perspective of process philosophy.