Translation Of Shijing From The Perspective Of Game Theory Based On Versions Of Legge And Xu

Game theory is a very important theoretical discipline among the whole social science.With the tools of mathematics,it has made deep and normative analysis of various social phenomena and achieved fruitful research results.Being an important analytic method,it can be applied to the discipline of Economics,Science,Politics and many other disciplines.At the beginning of twentieth century,some scholars began to borrow game theory to carry out translation studies.As the first classical collection of poems in ancient China,Shijing is the cradle and a splendid pearl of Chinese literature.It has a far-reaching and lasting influence on other literary forms before the Pre-Qin Dynasty.Therefore,translating it into English is of great significance to the spread of Chinese culture and the enhancement of China’s soft power all over the world.Based on two versions of Shijing translated by James Legge and Xu Yuanchong,this paper studies the translation of Shijing from the perspective of game theory by taking the translation of reduplicated words and nouns in it as examples.This paper analyzes the translating strategies of reduplicated words and nouns adopted by two translators from the perspective of three models of game theory—Prisoners’ Dilemma,Nash Equilibrium and Pareto Optimality.It is found that when reduplicated words and nouns contain more cultural factors,the strategy of foreignization is a better choice,which can not only spread Chinese culture,but also make the readers learn the exotic culture from China.When reduplicated words and nouns contain less the cultural factors,the use of domestication translation strategies is a relatively wise choice.