On Contemporary Chinese Literary Translation Of The Bible: Ideas And Practice

Beginning from the Tang Dynasty, the Bible translation in China has had a history of over 1300 years. With the spread of Christianity, the amendment and retranslation for Bible by Chinese translators has never stopped, and the translation ideas and principles produced in this process also keep changing. This thesis divides the development of the Bible translation theory in China into three phases: (1) Incultralized Bible translation, which introduces the translation strategy of Alopen who came to China from the west during the Tang Dynasty when he met the traditional Chinese culture and ideology influenced by Confucianism and Taoism. (2) Word-for-word Bible translation, which introduces the translation ideas of the western missionaries in Ming and Qing Dynasty like Poirot and Morrison who advocated preserving the original wording of the Bible. (3) Literary Bible translation, which introduces the literary translation done by Chinese translators, marked by Yan Fu's translation of Gospel of Mark.The literalizing process of the Bible translation in China can be divided into three phases: (1) The beginning of literalization (1908), which is marked by Yan Fu's translation of the first four chapters of Gospel of Mark. (2) The development of the literalization (from 1920s), in which some Chinese translators translated the biblical poems and songs in forms of ancient Chinese poems. (3) Literary translation (1980s), in which Chinese scholars Feng Xiang and Wang Hanchuan translated the Bible in a literary way.The literalization of the Bible translation has a direct relationship with the Chinese scholars'view of the Biblical text. As Chinese culture is deeply rooted in the thinking of Taoism and Confucianism, the foreign missionaries had to translate the Bible in a culturalized way. It was not until Morrison translated the whole Bible into Chinese that Chinese readers got to fully appreciate the Bible and realize the literariness of the Bible. After the New Culture Movement, the Chinese translators such as Xu Dishan, Zhu Weizhi, Wu Jingxiong and Fengxiang translated the Bible by employing literary techniques,; the Bible was gradually accepted as a literature. However in the west, the theological value of the Bible has been regarded as the primary value, and the Bible is regarded as a religious text, therefore the western Bible translation theory during a long period had been around the question that how to transmit the religious function of the Bible, in another word, whether it should be literal translation (like Jerome's word-for-word translation) or sense translation (like Nida's Dynamic Equivalence).This thesis firstly points out the literalization of Bible translation in China by comparing the Bible translation theories and their cultural causes in China and the west; secondly it discusses the literary views and ideas of Bible translation in Chinese context; thirdly it analyzes the practice of literary translation in China exemplified by Feng Xiang's translation of the Genesis and the Book of Job; and in the end the thesis makes a conclusion of the literary translation ideas and practice in China.