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Though formed in China, Dao De Jing belongs to the whole world to some extent. The author holds the belief that it has the function to instruct people all over the world. There are many English translation versions of this book, and the first English translation appeared in about 1870. Among these different English versions, here the author will focus on three main versions. They come from Lin Yutang, Gu Zhengkun and Arthur Waley respectively.,源^自,751"文'论.文]网[www.751com.cn
As we all know, Lin Yutang is very famous and influential in transmission of classical Chinese literature in western countries, as well as the average Chinese attitude towards life. Because of his belief in the humanism in his whole life, he complies with the principle of faithfulness and smoothness and spares no effort to pursue beauty, form and spirit in his works. In his work of The Wisdom of Laotse, he tries to strike out the gist of every chapter. Through his whole book, he split this book into seven chapters, that is, the character of Tao, the lessons of Tao, the limitation of Tao, the source of power, the conduct of life, the theory of government and aphorisms. One of his outstanding features is persity, for example, he uses “virtue”, “character”, “humanity” respectively to express the same meaning in this book.
As for Gu Zhengkun, president of Peking University Culture and Translation Society, his translation of Dao De Jing is also widely accepted. He has translated this book into The Book of Tao And Teh. In his translation version, he has put more emphasis on the acceptance of readers. In addition, he has adopted straight and popular words and used annotations as little as possible. In his opinion, Laotse’s Taoism is more systematic, more prudent and more coherent, in terms of comparing with Confucianism preached by Confucius and Mencius. Though this book contains only 5000 characters, it involves in subjects comprehensively ranging from philosophy, history, politics, ethics, to cultivation of man’s mind.
Another famous scholar is Arthur Waley. His translation The Way and Its Power, A Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought published in London in 1934 plays an important role in spreading of Laotse’s thought in the west. What’s more, this translation has been reprinted for several times and given a more systematic introduction to the Chinese philosophy in Pre-Qin times and the place of Laotse’s thoughts. He pays more attention to the expression of the subtle and concrete meaning. For example, in dealing with the translation of the word “赤子”, he uses “infant” instead of “child”, which can show the essence of virtue more exactly. Another example is the translation of the word “德”. Different from Lin Yutang, Arthur Waley has translated it into “power”, which lays stress on control. At the same time, he also wants to strive to figure out a kind of invisible power from oriental philosophy to return to the harmony of one’s inner heart.
Anyway, all these three versions are worthy of appreciating. Meanwhile, our Chinese culture will be transmitted abroad by these cultural ambassadors.
2.2 Culture-loaded Terms
2.2.1 Definition
As mentioned in the introduction part, cultured-loaded terms refer to the source language words which may express a concept that is totally unknown in the targetculture. In fact,they can also be defined as terms or words which include specific cultural connotation. If we study it from the perspective of linguistics, Leech, a famous English linguist, has classified words’ meaning into seven types, namely, conceptual meaning; connotative meaning; stylistic meaning; affective meaning; reflective meaning; collocative meaning and thematic meaning. Based on his theory and culture-loaded terms’ meaning, one can define them as words or expressions that contain connotative meaning. We can take “月下老人”as an example. In English, it can be translated into the Old Man of the Moon, which refers to the God of marriage who uses a red cord to attach a couple according to marriage fate recorded in books. If one doesn’t have a Chinese cultural background about this word, he may not be able to understand this culture-loaded word.