A Contrastive Study of English Translation of The Analects of Confucius from the Perspective of Context Theory 语境论下《论语》英译对比研究开题报告

 2022-12-26 22:59:22

1. 研究目的与意义

Since the end of the 16th century, Confucianism had already influenced the development of the European philosophy; it was highly praised and supported by the forerunners of the European Enlightenment. Especially the concept entailed in the sentence of Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you was well accepted, even got written into the human rights during the French revolution (Lis top 10 thinkers by an American almanac. From the information above we can clearly see the broad impact of Confucianism. And the broad impact cant be achieved without the translation and researches of The Analects of Confucius. This paper is to analyze two typical versions translated by James Legge and Ku Hung-Ming to explore how different translations make a difference to the expansion of Confucianism under the guidance of the context theory.

2. 文献综述

Literature Review2.1 The Context Theory The development of context theory has made great progress both at home and abroad. This section will introduce the origin and development of the context theory in the west and China. Since Polish anthropologist Malinowski Bronislaw Kaspar first proposed the concept of context and came to the conclusion that "if there is no context, there is no meaning" in 1903, there has been a continuous discussion on the classification of context. He divided context into two categories: the context of culture, which represents the social and cultural background in which people live; and context of the situation, which refers to the specific context in which speech takes place (Katan, 2004). J.R. Firth, an English linguist, absorbed Malinowski's concept of situational context and pointed out that context can be divided into two categories. One category is included in the language, in which case, languages make the contexts. The other is outside of the language, which includes the characteristics of the participants in the discourse, the related matters and the Influence of language activities. Halliday, a British linguist, proposed the concept of the register from the revelation of J.R. Firths situational context". His "register" is shaped by "field", "mode" and "tenor". Hymes, an American linguist, defined context as the circumstance in which language is used, and characterized the features of context by using the word SPEAKING: (S)etting and scene: the former refers to the time and the place of a speech act whereas the latter is the psychological setting or cultural definition of a scene; (P)articipants: these include the speaker and audience(addresses plus other hearers); (E)nds: this refers to the purpose of the discourse; (A)ct sequence: This is the format and order of the series of speech events which make up the speech act; (K)ey: these are the cues that establish the tone of the speech act; (I)nstrumentalities: these are the forms and styles of speech; (G)enre: this includes assorted categories such as poem, myth, tale, proverb (Cao, 2007). Cognitive linguistics emerged by the development of cognitive science in the 1980s. The basic theoretical basis of cognitive context is the relevance theory related to communication and cognition proposed by Sperber and Wilson. In their opinion, there are two modes involved in language communication, namely, code model and inference model. The cognitive context plays a different role in the process of discourse understanding than the traditional context which prefers to interpret human language communication from the perspective of cognitive psychology.Compared to the development of context theory in the west, the development of context theory is relatively late. Though most context theories put forward by Chinese scholars are based on the achievements that west scholars got, they have been trying to catching up the international level.The context in Chinese is commonly understood as 上下文 which was first introduced and stated by Ma Jianzhong. Chen Wangdao stated that the context of situation refers to different concrete situations where the text or the utterance happens. Wang Dechun proposed that context refers to the environment in which language is used, consisting of the objective factors such as the speakers social status, thought, character, profession, situation, and mood, etc. He Zhaoxiong proposed that the context should be divided into two parts: linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge. Hu Zhuanglin divided context into co-text, situational context, and cultural context. Xiong Xueliang proposed that cognitive context could make up the gap led by the inability of the language; his context theory pushed the development of context theory in China to the next level.The development of the context theory at home and abroad continues, and there will be more novel achievements to be expected in the future. This paper will mainly use the context theory put forward by Hymes, though it belongs to the category of static study of context theory, it provides a relatively systematic way to analyze texts, which inspires me to think more about the side under the surface of different translation of The Analects of Confucius. 2.2 The Analects of ConfuciusThe Analects of Confucius is one of the classic works of the Confucian school and a collection of essays in the form of sayings and dialogues. It mainly records the words and deeds of Confucius and his disciples and embodies the political, aesthetic, moral and ethical and utilitarian values of Confucius. The value of The Analects of Confucius can never be ignored. This section will briefly review the translations and different theories used in the research of the English translation of The Analects of Confucius. 2.2.1 The Translation of The Analects of ConfuciusIn 1594, Matteo Ricci published a Latin translation of the Four Books. Since then, The Analects of Confucius started to be translated into different western languages. The original English translations of the Analects of Confucius were all made by western missionaries, among which, the first widely influential one being the version of James Legge, a well-known English Sinologist. The study of the single version of the translation of The Analects of Confucius focuses primarily on the versions of several famous translators, such as James Legge, Ku Hung-Ming, Arthur Waley and Liu Dianjue. The translation of James Legge mostly adopts literal translation, trying to keep the thinking form and syntactic structure of the original text, and used the written style of English in the 19th century, with elegant wording and rigorous translation. The translation of Confucian classics was an important part of the religious enterprise to James Legge. He strongly believed that Jesus would replace Confucius. China, he declared, was bound to clash with the Christian powers and would inevitably lose. His hope is to convince Chinese people to abandon the ancient saints and turn to the western god. Ku Hung-Ming was ingenious in translating such classics as The Analects of Confucius, having Confucius and his disciples speak like educated Englishmen, eliminating all proper Chinese nouns to eliminate strangeness and distinctness, paraphrasing famous western writers and thinkers to annotate the text, and applying western concepts to replace Confucian terminology. This kind of "naturalization" method of translation was popular, especially after the First World War, when many Europeans turned to eastern civilization because of their doubts about western culture. So Ku Hung-Ming was regarded as a saint of eastern culture and his translation was widely read. Arthur Waley's version of The Analects of Confucius has always been the most popular version in the English-speaking world, and it is also popular in mainland China. The reason is that his version of translation tries to retain the cultural features of the original text, pay attention to the translation of details, and the text is relatively concise and the style is close to the original text. Liu Dianjue tries to explain the original meaning of Confucius and interpret his teachings as an organic whole. Many connectives and explanatory materials have been added to his translation, making the style somewhat tedious, which is different from the simple style of the original work. However, his translation is widely praised for its academic and accurate nature (Yang, 2008). The study of the two or more versions of the translation of The Analects of Confucius is mainly about the contrast between the translators I mentioned above. Among these relevant papers, the most popular choice is to compare the version of Ku Hung-Ming and James Legge. The general conclusion of these papers is mainly about judging the advantages and disadvantages of their translation.This paper will focus on two different versions of the English Translation of The Analects of Confucius presented by James Legge and Ku Hung-Ming. There are a lot of constative studies of these two versions, and that happens for a reason: these two translations are the most typical which proves the value to explore them deeper. 2.2.2 Various Perspectives of Study on English Versions of The Analects of ConfuciusOn CNKI, when we use The Analects of Confucius and English translation as the key words, we can find 382 related papers. These papers basically represent the perspective and emphasis of domestic scholars on the English translation of The Analects of Confucius. And most of these studies focus on the translation strategies, case study, and comparison and vocabulary translation of The Analects of Confucius. The study of different versions of translation is one of the most important aspects; it can be divided into two parts: study on the single version of translation and study on the comparison of two or more version of the translation. From the method of research, scholars tend to analyze the subjective of the translator, the purpose of translation, the characteristics of translation and advantages and disadvantages of translations when it comes to the single version of the translation. The study on two or more different versions of English translation mainly uses the method of contrast analysis. Most of the papers I found about the research on the English translation of The Analects of Confucius are under the guidance of a certain theory. Among these theories, Skopostheorie, cultural translation theory, the subjectivity of translator, Eco-translatology, cognitive pragmatic theory and hermeneutics are frequently used. With these theories, scholars explore the reasons why different translators have a different presentation about Confucianism. And after reading these papers, I come to realize that these theories that we have used on the study of the English translation of The Analects of Confucius can find their shadows in the context theories. However, when I try to find more papers about the study of context theory under the guidance of the context theory, there are just a few of them. The factors which could have serious impacts on the styles, skills and the effectiveness of the meaning transferring cannot be simply concluded by one or two points. We should seek a more comprehensive perspective to analyze and compare different versions of the translation of The Analects of Confucius.

3. 设计方案和技术路线

通过对比辜鸿铭和理雅各两人的翻译版本，来凸显出语境对于译本影响之深。

论文采用文献研究法来研究此影响。

4. 工作计划

第一周：确定论文的主题方向第二周：以论文题目为核心，对相关资料加以收集和翻阅。

第三周：对已收集的资料加以整理，评估论文的可行性。

第四周：整合已有的资料、构筑论文的大纲。

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5. 难点与创新点

用海姆斯的语境论分析《论语》的两个译本，尤其是从语码这一角度分析文化负载词，比较新颖。

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