Ethical Issues Concerning Translating Chinese Classics Into English

The existence and sustainable development of a nation depend as much on itscultural vitality as its political, economical and military power. Cultural vitality is oneof the most essential factors that reflects the overall strength and competitiveness of acountry. Chinese classics have always been cherished as an integral part of theessence of Chinese culture, a gleaming gem of the world civilization. However, in theprocess of globalization, Chinese culture is being threatened by the encroachment ofWestern cultures. In view of this, the translation of Chinese classics is an urgent,imperative and necessary task. It is one of the effective ways that helps preserving theChinese cultural identity and vitality, keeping its competitiveness at the world stage.Currently, translation of Chinese classics is attracting more and more attention andsupport from the academia and the Chinese government as well. Both theoreticalresearch and translation practice are making big strides forward in an organized andsystematical way. Therefore, with a promising prospect unfolding before the scholarsand translation practitioners, there is still a long way to go in both translation practiceand its related researches.Ethics, as a braid of philosophy concerning people’s action norms, plays aconsiderable role in guiding people’s practice of all sorts. Translational ethics, as thename suggests, makes a study of the relationship among various agents involved intranslating and also on the action norms of the translator himself, playing a decisiverole in the translation of classics and evaluating the quality of translation. The ethicsof a translator is determined by both subjective and objective factors. Raising thetranslator’s ethical awareness is conducive to mediating the various links oftranslating and ultimately improving the quality of translation.Cai Gen Tan is a representative book of aphorisms during the Ming Dynasty(1368-1644) and Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). It is reminiscent of Confucianism,Taoism and Buddhism, with rich references to earlier Chinese poets and philosophers.Cai Gen Tan started to come into the spotlight of the world stage because of theglamorous life wisdom it contains, such as the wisdom of staying healthy and making a living, the wisdom of managing a career and the wisdom of dealing with people.Due to the distinctive value of the original work, the translation of Cai Gen Tan intoother languages and its related researches are of significance enough in disseminatingChinese culture. There has been no lack of remarks and criticism on the translatedtexts of Cai Gen Tan, however, no one has reviewed them from the perspective oftranslation ethics. This thesis attempts to illustrate the guiding ethical principles in thetranslation of Chinese classics by analyzing and then commenting on the two Englishversions of Cai Gen Tan respectively by Paul White and by Jiang Jiansong (蒋坚松).Under the theoretical framework of Lawrence Venuti’s “Ethics of Difference” andAndrew Chesterman’s “Five Ethical Models”, the thesis also aims at exploring howtranslators deal with the conflicts between the source and target cultures. It alsoattempts to explore how translation ethics influences the production of translation andhow its positive influences are to be optimized and how its passive ones are to beminimized. By analyzing the selected sentences, the author believes that the very taskof translating Chinese classics is better done by Chinese translators. With theconduction of ethics, the classics translation can more effectively keep our culture’sidentity and vitality in the international communication.