A Comparative Study On John Chalmers’ And Stephen Mitchell’s Translations Of Daodejing From The Perspective Of Polysystem Theory

Since the emergence of the "Cultural Turn" in 1970s, translation studies was not limited on the linguistic level while began to be studied in the whole cultural circle. Among them, Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Theory employs politically and economically influential factors as its research scope. Besides, it also takes the position of translated literature into consideration, which extends the scope of translation studies.This thesis takes John Chalmers’ and Stephen Mitchell’s English translation versions of Daodejing as the cases of study. First of all, according to the Polysystem Theory, translators’ selection of the source texts is affected by the target language. Several factors, i.e., the necessity of communication between Christianity and Chinese culture, the economic and political needs of Britain, the influence of European philosophy and translator’s study on Chinese culture and so on, contributed to John Chalmers’ selection of Daodejing as the source text. To compare, this thesis has also made a detailed explanation of Stephen Mitchell’s selection, i.e., the discovery of Ma-Wang-Dui Silk Manuscripts, the influence of former American President, and the accumulation of Mitchell’s Zen training.In the second place, positions of the two English translations in literary polysystem have been clarified, and then the two translators’ selections of translation strategies have been conducted from the lexical and syntactic levels, which verify the huge effect that the position of translated literature within literary polysystem exerts influence on translators’ selection of translation strategies.Through a comparative study of two English translations of Daodejing, it is clear to see that the Polysystem Theory can be well applied in present translation studies. As the first academic paper that studies the translations of Daodejing from the perspective of Polysystem Theory, this paper aims to open a new perspective for Daodejing’s translation studies. Also, the author of this thesis hopes it will be of some help for further researches on the translation studies of Daodejing and for the dissemination of traditional Chinese classics as well.