Study and Translation of Sun Tzu’s Art of War in Recent Years

Abstract

Increasing more studies and translations of Sun Tzu’s Art of War which is one of the leading military masterpieces around the world has been witnessed in recent years. This paper reviews the translation by Sawyer, Minford, Lin and Huang to probe into the characteristics and mistranslations within the framework of Context Theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is found that Sawyer’s translation excels in the recontextualization of context of culture with rich para-texts, Minford tends to interpret with western discourse, Lin excels in comparatively accurate understanding of the source text and Huang’s translation merits in the recontextualization of language and military cultures.