Translator’s Gender and Language Features of the Tao Te Ching English Translations: A Next Step into the Translation from Individuation Perspective in Systemic Functional Linguistics

Abstract

Systemic functional approaches to translation studies have focused on the parameters of translation equivalence and shift within the hierarchy of realisation. However, translations from the perspective of individuation focus on language users, i.e., the author, translator and reader, involving ideological issues, showing tendentiously the genre, register and free options in a language in accordance with individual factors such as class, gender, age, race etc. to the language user. The present paper looks into one of the most significant individual factors—gender of the translator—in the English translations and re-translations of the Tao Te Ching as a next step into the model of individuation translation by using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The result shows that women translators’ reindividuations are more spoken, while men’s are more written in style, reflecting in three aspect: the choice of words, the choice of syntactic patterns and the choice of mood.