An Analysis Of Wing-tsit Chan’s Translation Of Chuan Xi Lu From The Perspective Of The Skopos Theory

Wang Yang-ming is a renowned Chinese philosopher in the Ming dynasty(1368-1644)who epitomized the thought of the School of Mind in Neo-Confucianism.Chuan Xi Lu(《传习录》),which contains Wang Yang-ming’s most critical philosophical thoughts and gathers letters and conversations between Wang Yang-ming and his students and friends,is the most critical work of Wang Yang-ming.It is of great significance to translate and interpret Chuan Xi Lu.There have been only two complete English versions of the book:Frederick G.Henke’s The Philosophy of Wang Yang-ming(1916)and Wing-tsit Chan’s Instructions for Practical Living:And Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-Ming(1963).Wing tsit Chan is a philosopher and translator,and his translation of the book has a profound influence on the English world.This study analyzed Wing-tsit Chan’s translation through the three rules of Skopos Theory and introduced the translation purposes and translation methods in Chan’s translation.After research,this thesis believes that Chan’s translation was guided by the four primary translation purposes,namely:introducing Chinese philosophy,meeting the expectation of target readers and the requirement of the Translations from the Oriental Classics series,and solving problems in Henke’s translation,and applied the three rules of Skopos Theory.To be specific,the translations of annotations and terms,names and locations followed the Skopos rule;the translations of sentence patterns and culture-loaded words took the culture of the target language and readers’ expectation into consideration,which conformed to the coherence rule;and the translations of the style of passage and literary allusion were in accord with the fidelity rule.This thesis facilitates the translation and dissemination of Chinese classics.