A Contrastive Study Of Two English Versions Of San Zi Jing From The Perspective Of Translator Behavior Criticism

As a Chinese traditional children's primer,San Zi Jing is a precious cultural heritage of China.It is famous for short form,beautiful rhyme and rich contents.Since the late Qing Dynasty,it has been translated overseas by foreign translators,among whom the version of Herbert A.Giles in 1900 is the most representative.Chinese scholars,such as Pan Shizi,Wang Baotong,Zhao Yanchun,also take the promotion of Chinese culture as their responsibility,and constantly translate San Zi Jing and Zhao Yanchun's version is the most influential.In terms of San Zi Jing's translation,most domestic scholars put their focuses on linguistic level,so it is necessary to study these translations from new perspectives.“Translator Behavior Criticism” is an original theoretical system put forward by Zhou Lingshun,a native Chinese scholar.Taking translator as the object,it explores the interaction between translator and the translated text from the intra-translation and extra-translation,and explores the internal and external causes of translator behavior at the linguistic level and social level,which helps us to have a deeper understanding of translation,a special cross-cultural communication phenomenon.Therefore,based on the theory of Translator Behavior Criticism,this paper contrasts and evaluates Giles' and Zhao's translator behavior by taking the two translators' translations of San Zi Jing as the research objects.Based on the two translators' translator behavior,this paper uses descriptive comparative method to evaluate the two translators' rationality according to their intra-translation behavior and extra-translation behavior.Firstly,on the basis of the “Truth-Seeking-Utility-Attaining” Evaluative Model of Continuum,treating the two translators as “linguistic beings”,this paper makes a contrastive analysis of Giles' and Zhao's intra-translation behavior by researching at the linguistic level and the translation strategies and methods adopted by the translators from the three aspects of translation of “meaning”,“rhyme” and “form”.Then,the author makes an analysis of the two translators' extra-translation behavior factors by regarding them as “social beings”.mainly focusing on the translators themselves,their motives and their target readers,which can have some influences on their translator behavior as well as their English versions.Finally,combining the two translators' intra-translation behavior and extra-translation behavior and according to the translator behavior rules,the degree of rationality of Giles' and Zhao's translator behavior will be judged.Through the analysis,it is found that in terms of the translation of meaning,Giles generally tends to be“Truth-seeking” to the author and the original text while Zhao is inclined to be “Utility-attaining” to the society and readers.In terms of the reproduction of rhyme and sentence form,Giles abandons to reproduce these features of the original text,while Zhao pays great attention to them,adopts the common rhyming scheme of“AABB” in English throughout the whole translation,and uses an unprecedented form of “three words in one line,four lines in one stanza” to show the beauty of the original text.All their adjustments to their translations are closely related to their extra-translation behavior factors.On the whole,both the two translators' behaviors are rational.By comparing the two translators' behavior and their rationality,this paper attempts to test the practicality of Translator Behavior Criticism theory,and hopes to provide a reference for the future translation of Chinese classics through an objective evaluation of the two English versions.