The influence of the translator's culture on the translation of selected rhetorical devices in Confucius' Analects

[摘要] English: Aristotle and Confucius were influential philosophers in the Western and Eastern worldrespectively. Both of their rhetoric also made the literature of their cultures flourish. One ofConfucius' famous works, the Analects, has influenced the values, philosophy, morality andeven rhetoric of Chinese people since ancient times. This study focuses on rhetoric from thepoint of view of metadiscourse, and by considering its function in different genres and in thesuccessfulness of writing, it confirms that metadiscourse is one of the factors that madeAristotle's and Confucius' work so influential. The existence of the relationship betweenAristotle's ethos and metadiscourse was proved by Crismore and Farnsworth (1989). In otherwords, Aristotle's rhetorical strategy is regarded as one of the facets of metadiscourse. Thestudy takes this assertion and applies it to Confucius' rhetoric, further proving that Confucianrhetoric also falls under the theory of metadiscourse.The Analects has been translated into other languages since the 17th century. Thesetranslations were completed by many different agents from different times and culturalbackgrounds. These differences influenced their motivations for doing the translations andalso resulted in different translation strategies. The study investigates selected rhetoricaldevices of the Analects and four translations of these devices from the point of view ofmetadiscourse and culture, and proves that the translators' cultural contexts influenced theirparticular translation preferences when they dealt with these rhetorical devices. The results ofthe study will hopefully make modern scholars or translators more aware of the influences ofcultural issues on their motivations and their translations, as well as of the potentialmetadiscoursal aspects of which translators make use. Moreover, this research endeavours toshift people's focus from the correctness of a translation to the suitability thereof. It aims tobroaden the scope of research for scholars who wish to study the various issues related to theprocess of translating the Analects.

[发布机构] University of the Free State