The Bible of Confucianism

Abstract

The Analects is the most influential and enduring Chinese classics, which shows its splendor as early as 2,400 years ago between the spring and autumn and the warring states periods, covering a wide scope of subjects from politics, philosophy, literature and art to the education and moral cultivation. To the translator, the most important and most difficult problem is to understand the words and expressions of the archaic Chinese, and the culture background when translating literary classics. In this paper, we choose two versions to compare and analyze. One is from the Arthur Waley, whose version is considered to be the best and the complete one, another is from Ding Wangdao who is a Chinese professor. Compared to two versions, we will study the strategies of the book-domestication and foreignization from lexical level, syntactic level, stylistic level and cultural level.