"Mencius" Thai Translation Research

Mencius is one of the Chinese Confucian classics, which kept records of the governing thoughts and political strategies of Mencius—the great ideologist from the Warring States Period, hailed as one of the classics in Chinese literature. Mencius is a famous ideologist, educationist and politician in ancient China, one of the principal representatives of Confucianism in China. He Inherited and carried forward the thought of Confucius. Mencius is referred to as the Second Sage after Confucius, the Chinese Sage, giving great influence on later generations. In the last50years, there has been a steady increase in the translation of Mencius in Thai. This paper is thus written to comb the status of Thai translation of Mencius in the last50years and to give an objective statement of the Thai translation of Mencius from the angle of cultural misreading, culture-loaded words and translation methods. This paper is organized as follows:Section1:Introduction. This section discusses the origin, objectives and significance of the research, theory and methodology, comment on relative researches, as well as extent of the study and its basic ideas.Section2:Study on the original Mencius. This section introduces the important position of Mencius and his main works, studies the original Mencius as well as its commentaries, summaries the main ideas of Mencius, and analysis the overall condition of western translation of Mencius, mainly English translation.Section3:Summary on the overall condition of Thai translation of Mencius in the last50years. This section divides the Thai translation of Mencius into three categories:complete version of translation, partial translation and medio-translation. It presents the basic information of all the translation versions, including book title, name of author, publishing house, release date and so on. This section combs the status on internet transmission of Mencius at the very end.Section4:Analysis and comment on the complete translation of Mencius in Thai. This section concretely analysis the complete version of translation, illustrates the phenomenon of cultural misreading, and the translation method on culture-loaded words. Besides, this section also comments on the overall condition of complete translation of Mencius in Thai and gives out value judgments. Section5:Summary and Suggestion. Through research on the original Chinese version of Mencius and its Thai version from the previous four sections, this section summarizes this paper and brings up some new ideas and suggestions for further research.Through this paper, I have promoted my ability of scientific research, and mastered some new research methods. Through the process of collecting related materials, I have learned the method of data collection and arrangement. In writing this paper, not only have I had a better understanding of the classics Mencius, but also learned its transmission in Thailand, as well as increasing my accumulation of knowledge about translation theories. Moreover, I have promoted my ability of reading and writing in Thai, mastered the translation method of some culture-loaded words, as well as the translation method of Chinese classics, learning new words and sentences.