A Study On English Versions Of The Analects Of Confucius

With the cultural turn in the translation studies and the translational turn in the culture studies, the complicated relationship between the culture and the language has been given more and more attention. As a cross-cultural communication activity, translation plays an important role in cultural communication. There has been more than 300 years since the first English version of the Analects appeared in 1691. In the meanwhile, a large number of translations have been published, but they are different from one another because of translators'diverse historical and cultural background, purposes of translation and many other influences. Based on different English versions of the Analects, this thesis makes an attempt to probe into the effects and deviation of cultural transmission in translations.The Analects is one of Chinese Confucian classics influential both at home and abroad. Its translation is also an important part of cultural communication between the Chinese and Western Culture, and many Chinese scholars have made a lot of researches on relevant subjects. But these researches concentrate on the quality of translations or comparison among several versions. This thesis is also based on different translations, but the emphasis is put on the Chinese native cultural features in the Analects. There are many key concepts and cultural specific lexical items that cannot be found fully equivalent translations in English due to the differences of language and culture. It seems that some translations are equivalent on the surface, but many characteristics of source language culture have been lost in the translating process. Some translators render the same concept into different translations according to the context. In the writer's opinion, it is unworthy to seek accurate meaning at the expense of the coherence of the whole text. By means of comparing and analyzing various translations of selected key concepts and cultural specific items in English, the effects and deviations are mainly discussed and approaches adopted to deal with cultural translation are also analyzed in this thesis.With globalization, promoting intercultural communication and keeping the wholeness of Chinese culture is of great significance both to China and the whole world. However, the speed of cultural exportation has dropped far behind the pace of cultural importation. Chinese translators should value this matter and pay more attention to maintaining Chinese native cultural features. For cultural concepts with no equivalents in target language, translators should boldly render them in a creative way. It may influence the understanding of target language readers at first, but it will be beneficial to the complementation between different cultures in the long run.