A Comparative Study On English Translations Of Judgements And Lines In Yi Jing By James Legge, Richard Wilhelm And John Minford: Based On Morris’ Trichotomy Of Sign Meaning

Yi Jing dominates the Chinese classics,and is considered as“the source of Chinese thoughts”.The value of Yi Jing is reflected not only in its cultural aspects but also in many other ways,including the areas of literature,philosophy,politics,education,and religion.However,there has been a lack of attention to the English translation of Yi Jing in domestic academic world,especially in the field of interdisciplinary studies such as semiotics,which has much to do with translation studies.In addition,most of the existing representative translations have been produced abroad,and the latest is translated by John Minford and published in 2014.Against this context,the present study is a comparative analysis of three representative English translations of Yi Jing(The Yi King by James Legge in the 19^thcentury;The I Ching by Richard Wilhelm in the 20^th century;and I Ching by John Minford in the 21^st century)from the perspective of their referential meaning,linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning within the field of semiotics.The main method applied in the study is textual comparison.There are some similarities between the three versions:a)They all fail to capture some historical clues implied in the 64 hexagrams from the late Shang to early Zhou dynasties;b)they do not express the ancient song components in many places;and c)they are inaccurate in the handling of philosophical phrases.However,on the whole,Minford’s text is the best for its accuracy,conciseness and consistency.Based on the comparative analysis,this thesis further discusses some suggestions of the retranslation of Yi Jing from a semiotic perspective.Analyzing three representative English translations of Yi Jing from the semiotic perspective,integrating the common problems of the translations in the above three aspects and extracting the implications for the retranslation of Yi Jing,this study has enriched extant literature on the translation and transmission of this book,and provided implications for the retranslation of classic works.