| The Chinese-English translation activities of the Protestant missionaries started around 1810 and basically ended in the early 20thcentury.Religious documents such as Buddhist classics constitute an important part of the translated literature.Among the missionary translators,Samuel Beal is the most prominent in terms of the number and variety of Buddhist scriptures translated.Of the 30 Chinese Buddhist works translated by missionaries during late Qing,Beal alone offered 19.However,research on Beal’s translation achievements is far from being complete,accurate,concentrated,and systematic.Basing itself on first-hand historical materials and related research,this thesis serves as a synchronic,local analysis of as well as a diachronic,global observation on Beal’s translations of Chinese Buddhist literature.It analyzes the main characteristics of his translations in terms of motivation,strategies,text selection,the use of paratexts,etc.By these means,the thesis tries to make a comprehensive,accurate description as well as a multidimensional,in-depth explanation of Beal’s translation activities.Its major findings are as follows:Among the 19 Buddhist works that Beal translated,8 were published as separately bound books while 11 appeared as magazine articles.Three motives can be discerned for Beal’s decades-long translation activities.Firstly,he was driven by the passion and lifelong pursuit of Buddhist research.Secondly,he had a desire to fill the gap in translating Buddhist scriptures directly from Chinese instead of European languages.Thirdly,he regarded an understanding of Chinese indigenous religion as the basis for spreading Christianity and hoped to gain missionary experience from the spread of Buddhism in China.Beal’s Buddhist translation activities have two distinct tendencies in the selection of texts.One is the preference for Buddhist canons.The other is the translations of works on travels in the west and biographies of eminent monks.Another major feature of Beal’s translations is that the main texts of the translation are accompanied by a wealth of paratexts.In terms of translation strategy,Beal is basically a“foreignizing”one,which is intended to distinguish the“Self”from the“Other”--the heterogeneous Chinese Buddhist culture.When he finds it difficult to reconcile faithfulness to the original texts with literariness of the English versions,Beal inclines to sacrifice literariness for faithfulness.Through careful analysis of the two versions of Beal’s The Sutra of the Forty-two Sections,it can be found that the first version demonstrates Beal’s utmost effort in adhering to the original sutra.However,this version is far from being satisfactory owing to the poor available resources as well as the complexity of his translation purposes.Through the foreignizing strategy,Beal highlights the differences between Buddhism and Christianity,and his ultimate goal is to promote the spread of Christianity in China.In the revised version Beal did a much better job in both accuracy and reader-friendliness.But Beal’s Christian interpretation of the core of Buddhism in the two versions is a fixation on the Christian cultural factors,an attempt to incorporate Eastern civilization into the Christian interpretation system,and a dislocation of the Buddhist and Christian thoughts.As a matter of fact,no matter what kind of translation strategy Beal adopts,be it foreignization or domestication,the ultimate purpose of his English translations is to spread Protestantism in China. |
