On Mencius' Key Philosophical Terms C-E Translation In The Perspective Of Reception Theory

Mencius keeps a record of political activities, doctrine and philosophy, moral principles and educational ideology of the whole life of Mencius by way of narration and dialogue and also describes the debate over the inborn goodness of human nature, being one the most influential classic works, which has a profound influence on Chinese philosophy. Literature review shows that the studies on the English translation of Mencius are mostly confined to James Legge‘s version and the studies on other translators‘ versions such as LCC‘s and D. C. Lau‘s are relatively insufficient. It can be concluded that domestic scholars would like to take James Legge‘s version as the research object when conducting the researches on Mencius translation. They mainly focus on how to transfer the two languages efficiently and solve some other linguistic problems, but pay less attention to the problems whether the translated texts can reflect exactly the ideas and cultural connotations of the source text or not. As to methodologies, most researchers adopt the pure linguistic research norm to make comparative studies of the linguistic styles of the translated texts and discuss the gain and loss of the translated texts. With the guidance of Reception Theory, based on the corpus of James Legge, the LCC and D. C. Lau‘s versions of Mencius, a comparative study will be conducted on the key philosophical terms: Ren, Yi and Li(?????). After comparison, reasons for the differences will be stated.Hans Robert Jauss gave in his monumental essay ?Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory? in Towards an Theory of Reception(1982), which marked the birth of Reception Theory. This theory, based on the study of reader, which will focus on opinions of two major leaders of reception theory, namely, Jauss‘ ?horizon of expectations? and Iser‘s ?blanks & indeterminacy? as well as ?reader‘s role & status? to explore translators‘ creative reproduction of literary translation, poses a new way for explanation of literary translation.Under the guidance of Marxism and Reception Theory, this thesis makes a summary of the differences among these three translated texts with the help of self-built parallel corpus. The systematic study in the thesis leads to the following findings:First, distinct stylistic features can be found in the three versions.Targeting at missionaries, James adopted the 19 century old English and strived for faithfulness. His translations gave a detailed explanation on background information, stupendous annotations about words, phrases sentences, proper names etc. He even made a summary of each section, which serves a valuable reference for later comers and scholars.Lau‘s translation work is of high academic value and receives good comments popularly in western sinology circle, being considered as the exemplary work for translating Chinese classics into English. His translated works is precise, fluent and of super-readability, popular with scholars and ordinary readers, which meets the needs of contemporary scholars and ordaniray readers in every aspect.Zhao et al. translated Mencius for modern readers, who might have acquired more knowledge of China and want to learn something about Mencius. Therefore, the language is simple and plain with all the personal and place names in Pinyin; the style is of medium formal, which is much easier for readers to get knowledge of ancient names, places etc. helping readers better understand Chinese language and culture.Finally, quantitative analysis shows that Ren appears 157 times in Mencius, and ?benevolent/benevolence? gains a dominant position in these three versions. It can be found that Yi rendered as ?righteousness/righteous? is the most widely accepted in Legge‘s and LCC‘s versions with its frequency at the times of 95 and 77 respectively. Li appears altogether 68 times and it can be found that ?propriety? is the most widely translated in Legge‘s with the number of 41 times, while in Lau‘s version ?rites/ritual? gains a dominant position with the frequency of 49 times, however, LCC seems to be more various using words such as ?rites/ritual, decorum and courtesy/courteous?. The results show that translators from different times and countries share the same horizon of expectations.