Comparison Of Rhetoric Translation Of Zhongyong Translated By James Legge And Ku Hung-ming

As we all know, rhetoric is a kind of language art and skill, and many scholarshave committed to the research of rhetoric filed with hard work, from thecontemporary literature to the Poetry of Tang and Song and the Four Books and so on.While as a very important and classic work of our history of literature, as well asimmortal treasures of history of Chinese civilization, Zhongyong has been translatedinto many foreign languages. Even there are a dozen kinds of editions just for Englishtranslation which are controversial. Though the field of research and application isquite extensive, from study, life, governing to business, the microscopic field studyinvolves less, especially for the rhetoric research. So it is worthwhile doing researchon the rhetoric of Zhongyong, because what it transfers is not only our culture ofrhetoric, but also the soul of Confucian culture of our country. While it is a reallyserious question we need deep consideration at the moment, that whether can we findout its value or show to the people all around the world.Functional equivalence theory is widely applied to the field of translation,especially for literary translation which has a distinct personality. For it requiresexpressing its spiritual essence of the source text at first, while at the meantime, itneeds specific style suiting with its source text，so functional equivalence theory is animportant guidance to the translation of literary works. In addition, from Eugene A.Nida’s later theory we can also see that we should pay more and more attention toformal equivalence, especially to rhetoric which can embody the style of text mostly.So it is the point in this research that whether can we embody the style at the time weexpress its inner meaning.The paper will adopt the functional equivalence theory of Eugene A.Nida tocompare James Legge’s translation to Ku Hung-Ming’s, and then to analyze thetranslation of rhetoric to test the application the functional equivalence in rhetorictranslation both in meaning and style level. At last, get conclusion, despite the rhetorictranslation is too difficult to complete functional equivalence strictly, the functionalequivalence still has a good instruction to rhetoric translation. So in order to show our own specific culture to the world, we should try our best to search better solutionfacing the problems taking place in the procedure of translation for the purpose ofreaching better effective communication to the world.