A Contrastive Study On Legge’s And Xu Yuanchong’s English Versions Of Shijing From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As one of the cultural classics of China, Shijing is considered as anencyclopedia on the study of various problems of early humans. It does not only playa paramount role in Chinese literature, but also is one of the most prominent culturalheritages in the world and has made a tremendous contribution to the developmentand study of world literature. Since the19thcentury, with the occurrence of variousEnglish versions of Shijing, numerous scholars have been devoted to the study on thetranslated versions from the perspective of translators, translating strategies andmethods, and cultural context. However, their researches are mainly restricted tolinguistic, literary and cultural levels, which are not novel enough. With thepragmatic turn of translation studies, adaptation theory has provided a relativelycomplete and feasible theoretical viewpoint for the study on English versions ofShijing.According to the adaptation theory, translating is a process of linguistic choicemaking of the target language. In the light of variability, negotiability andadaptability of language, translators will make correspondent linguistic choice toadapt to given mental, physical and social world.From the perspective of adaptation theory, the thesis makes a contrastive studyon Legge’s and Xu Yuanchong’s English versions of Shijing. As they are fromdifferent nations, sharing different cultural background and living in differenthistorical times, they have to make different linguistic choices so as to adapt todifferent social, historical, cultural and linguistic environment, different targetlanguage readers and communicative purposes. The author considers that inconsequence of the adaptation to different levels, Legge and Xu Yuanchong haveapplied distinctly different translating strategies and methods to forms, images,rhetoric, and titles of the poems. All in all, through the contrastive research, the thesiscomes to a conclusion that the application of adaptation provides a completely newviewpoint to the translation studies on Chinese classics.