A Contrastive Study Of James Legge's And Ku Hungming's English Versions Of Lunyu From The Perspective Of Metonymics

Lunyu, the most representative Confucian classic, has exerted extensive and profound influence on the development of Chinese society and culture for more than two thousand years. As the old saying goes, to know half the essense of Lunyu enables one to administer a country. Given its prominent position in the Chinese social and cultural systems, Lunyu has been translated into many Western languages, English included. Up to now, there have been more than thirty complete English versions of this Confucian classic. Meanwhile, a lot of studies on these English versions have been conducted by scholars and critics of translation studies from various perspectives such as skopostheorie, postcolonialism, hermeneutics, and adaptation theory. These studies have achieved a lot of fruitful results. This thesis, based on the research findings of previous studies in this research field, attempts to carry out a contrastive study of James Legge's and Ku Hungming's English translations of Lunyu from the perspective of metonymics.Metonymic is one of the two basic modes of human thought, its essense being a part substituting for the whole. This thesis conducts a constrastive analysis of the metonymic features of the translations of Lunyu by James Legge and Ku Hungming and their metonymic choices in translation. It is shown in this study that when translating, the translator confronts metonymic features (i.e. textual elements) of the source text at the lingustic, literary and cultural levels. These metonymic features always make inconsistent demands on the translator, which drags him into a dilemma in which he has to abandon some metonymic features of the source text to preserve others in his translated text. Thus his translation can only be a partial representation of the source text and can only projects its partial image in the minds of the target readers, which verifies that translation is in its essense metonymic. Meanwhile, this study, taking the Skopostheorie and the Rewriting Theory as its theoretical bases, points out that the translator's metonymic choices in translation are mainly affected by his translation purpose, ideolgy and target readers and that different translators of the same source text, due to their distinct translation purposes, ideologies and target readers, make different metonymic choices in translation, namely, preserving in their translated texts different metonymic features of the same source text. As a result, they produce different translations of the same source text and project its different images in the minds of target readers. This explains the rationality of the diversity of translations of the same source text from the perspective of metonymics. Finally, this study shows that the same and one metonymic choice by the translator may keep one formal quality of the source text at the cost of another. For instance, Legge's translation keeps the formal quality of conciseness of Lunyu but loses its colloquial formal quality at the same time. Thus it is hard to say whether his translation is literal or free, foreignizing or domesticating. Therefore, this study holds that, compared with the traditional binary classifications such as literal and free, or foreignizing and domesticating, or formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence, an awareness of the metonymics of translation promises a more objective analysis and assessment of the translations and the translation process,which will undoubtedly contribute to the enrichment of translation study perspectives.