| Translation has a long history. This kind of human activity plays an important role in people’s social life as well as in the academic field. Chinese great philosophical work Tao Te Ching exhibits its significance in the world. It has made great influence since it was translated into English versions. The ideas and propositions in this book have been spreading in western countries since more than two hundred years ago. The author of Tao Te Ching is called Lao Tzu, a great Chinese philosopher who lived in the Spring and Autumn Period. This Period is of wars and disputes which gives him the inspiration of the theory of Taoism in the book of Tao Te Ching. In Taoism, the origin of the universe and the fundamental law of the world is Tao which is a philosophical category. Tao Te Ching has various translated versions in English because of its popularity around the world. Different translation theories and approaches in these translated English versions are worthy of study in order to research on the more scientific ways in the aspects of translation strategies. The most accepted text version of Tao Te Ching is that of Wang Bi, the one considered the most original. Then the Ma Wangdui text which is known in the West as the "Silk Text" was discovered in Hunan, however the text of Wang Bi is still taken as the standard Chinese version of Tao Te Ching. This thesis takes the text of Wang Bi according to Lou (2008,2011) as source text for analysis. The English version of Tao Te Ching by Chinese scholar Gu Zhengkun (2006) and Scottish sinologist James Legge (1891) are chosen to be analyzed in this thesis.Frame semantics is a theory proposed by Charles J. Fillmore in 1970s. It relates linguistic semantics to encyclopedic knowledge and is a branch of cognitive linguistics. Fillmore and Atkins (1992) believe that the determination of meaning must refer to a certain background knowledge hierarchy which reflects knower’s experience, belief, and practice. This knowledge hierarchy was "frame" in Fillmore’s theory. This thesis takes Fillmore’s frame semantics as the guarding theory for analysis.With the help of the theory of frame semantics, there appears a new method to analyze the translation of Tao Te Ching and to evaluate the translation strategies used by the translators. From the perspective of frame semantics, translators use their encyclopedic as well as their academic knowledge to recognize and comprehend various scenes in the source text. They try to search for the most adequate frames in the target text with the expressions which can get a match between the source language and the target language. By analyzing the translation of Tao Te Ching, this study aims at exploring more scientific and systemic translation strategies from the perspective of frame semantics. |
PDF Full Text Request