A Cultural-perspective Comparison Of Three English Versions Of Tao Te Ching: From James Legge, Arthur Waley To Gu Zhengkun

Tao Te Ching, the earliest Taoist philosophical text in China, is a monumental work in the history of Chinese culture. The "Tao" or "Way" expounded in this book has been a sublime concept for Chinese people. Tao Te Ching has profound influence not only on Chinese traditional culture and people's everyday life, but also on Chinese ancient politics, philosophy, military affairs, literature and art, even on Chinese national characteristics and national spirits. In modern times, with the expansion of international communication, this book has been given wide publicity so much so that it has become a spiritual wealth commonly shared by all peoples in the world. Ever since the birth of its first English translation, the work itself has received increasingly great attention around the world. Up till now, the translation of Tao Te Ching has still been going on and the different translations of Tao Te Ching have successively come out, which makes it the most widely translated text next to the Bible. It has stimulated the interest of many foreign philosophers, scientists, statesmen, and entrepreneurs and inspired them considerably. Renowned thinkers, including Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Leo Tolstoy, and Albert Einstein, all paid high tribute to Tao Te Ching. The former US President Ronald Reagan quoted from Tao Te Ching in his State of the Union Address: "To govern a great nation requires the same care as to fry a small fish." This is the situation that adds up to the world-wide fascination about the book, making it again a focus of today's discourse, and it is also this same situation that drives the author to make a further research into the translation of the book.In this thesis, the author chooses three celebrated English translations of Tao Te Ching as the objects for comparison and research work; they are respectively the British missionary James Legge's version in 1891, the English scholar Arthur Waley's version in 1937 and that of Gu Zhengkun, a Chinese professor of Beijing University, in 2007. These versions are representative enough because they are translated by people at different historical times with far different cultural background. The author of this thesis bases her study on the means of subjecting them to a critical reexamination from a cultural-perspective, with the help of the perspective of "fusion of horizons" in hermeneutics. The author, through this cultural-perspective diachronic comparison of different versions of the same source text, aims to cast new lights onto the temporal and cultural situated interpretation and the translation of Tao Te Ching, thus arguing for the need to re-contextulize and re-translate canonized texts according to the diachronical changes of the thoughts and ideas conveyed in the books, and hoping to find out some practical approaches to the translation of Tao Te Ching by taking into consideration the effects of those cultural-related factors on the process of translation.