The Textual Significance Of Shi In Sun-Tzu: The Art Of War And Its Translation

The past thirty years or so has witnessed a surge of development in text analysis as quite a few linguists have been exploring and unveiling the mystery of the nature of language. Text analysis, especially Halliday's systemic functional model, sheds instructive light on other researches. Though its application to translation studies took its first step not long ago, it has gained an aggressive momentum, with a group of distinguished translation theorists showing up and volumes of their works springing up. One after another, their reflections upon translation studies are shared and enjoyed by us. Unfortunately, much of them focuses on why we should apply what text analysis advocates to either translation studies or translating practice rather than on how. Another pity is the fact that no one explicitly proposes textual standards towards translation evaluation though some actually touched it. Furthermore, their discussions are too theoretical and expansive to be of use in practice.Based upon text analysis in theory and inspired by the One-Many perspective in cognition, this paper explores textual standards towards translation evaluation, taking the translation of a culture-loaded concept Shi (势) in five versions of Sun-Tzu: The Art of War as a case in point, while introducing textual standards to evaluate the translation of Shi, this paper discusses the dilemma of wandering between specification and generalization in translating culture-loaded concepts, coming up eventually with a tentative strategy that satisfies both. The strategy is to select a more general and more embracing term, usually in Chinese Pinyin or at least with the first letter capitalized, to stand for all its conceptual meanings in form and then use its specific meanings plus of plus the term selected. Thus, not only is the concept able to take its prominence as a concept and to be respected and refuse any easy interpretation or even distortion of the concept, but the conceptual consistency can be effected and it is easy to fit different contexts. This strategy can also be applied to the translation of other culture-loaded concepts.