A Comparative Study of the Speech Act Advise in Two English Translations of the I Ching

Abstract

The present paper reports on a study that compares the strategies of performing Advise as a speech act in two English translations of the I Ching by Richard Wilhelm/ Cary F. Baynes (hereafter, the Wilhelm/Baynes translation) and Alfred Huang (hereafter, the Huang translation) respectively. A dataset consisting of 2,665 sentences was described, compared and analysed after being extracted from the two translations of the I Ching. As a result, the research findings indicate that the number of sentences implementing Advise is very similar between the two translations, yet they have significant differences in terms of several strategies for advice-giving, i.e. Imperative, Impersonal, Hints, Possibility/probability, and Conditional. Accordingly, it is argued that these differences can be traced back to the cultural backgrounds of the two translators and the philosophies they uphold for their own translation.