A Comparative Study Of English Versions Of Tao Te Ching

Tao Te Ching, the crystallization of ancient Chinese civilization, is not only rich cultural and spiritual heritage of Chinese nation, but also the cultural wealth of all human beings. Its influence is far-reaching in ancient and modern times, at home and aboard. The core of Tao Te Ching is "Tao", and it covers philosophical thinking of all aspects, which ranges from everyday life to universal origins. A series of issues in modern society, such as the contradictions between man and nature, man and man, and the individual’s lacking in beliefs can all find their corresponding answers in Tao Te Ching. Therefore, the author of this thesis chooses Tao Te Ching to study. He chooses three English versions translated by James Legge, Arthur Waley, and Gu Zhengkun respectively because the. translators belong to different historical periods, both home and abroad.An Approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection (TAS) is a new perspective of translation study. The paper first elaborates the application of TAS in translation studies, focusing on the translator’s dominance and its explanatory function of translation. Then, the thesis carries out a detailed and systematic comparison and evaluation of the three translated versions in terms of selective-adaptation and adaptive-selection. Lastly, the author makes an evaluation of those three versions. By comparing the three versions, the author hopes to find out how the three translators make their selective-adaptation and adaptive-selection transformations during the translation process.Through the comparative analysis from the perspective of TAS, the main conclusions in this thesis are as follows:1) The three translators all adapt to their translational eco-environment well during the translation of Tao Te Ching;2) The differences of translational eco-environments contribute to the different transformations in linguistic, cultural, and communicative dimensions;3) As for the linguistic dimension transformation, those translators are relatively successful; The transformations in cultural and communicative dimensions are mutually exclusive to some extent, and it is difficult for translators to make the best of both dimensions. Translators sometimes have to make sacrifice in one of them to complete the transformation of the other one;4) Analysis of translational eco-environment shows the reasons why a translator can not transform well in a certain dimension;5) Through the evaluation, the author finds out that the "degrees of holistic adaptation and selection" of three versions are all high, and this is actually the exact reason that the three versions can become classics.