A Study on the Chinese Translations of the Scripture Quotations from the King James Version Quoted in John Bunyan''s The Pilgrim''s Progress: from the Text-type Perspective of Katharina Reiss

• Main Authors: Zizhen Wu, 吳梓禎
• Other Authors: Ruey-shan Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/81387932917844966489

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語系口筆譯碩士班 === 101 === John Bunyan directly and indirectly quoted a lot of sentences or phrases from the King James Version (KJV) in his allegorical novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is highly acclaimed as the most widely-read English work barring the Bible. The Chinese translations of the Scriptures quoted in The Pilgrim’s Progress are the foci of this thesis. In this thesis, the attitude of product-oriented DTS (descriptive translation studies) is adopted to analyze and compare the two Chinese translations of the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress by Xihai and by Chen Jianmin, respectively, and their Chinese translations of the Scripture quotations are checked to see whether they have the same wording with the Hehe ben, the most popular Chinese Bible in the Chinese-speaking world. The Hehe ben is given the first priority to consult for appropriateness in the translations of the Scripture quotations in my thesis. Moreover, if the corresponding words in the Hehe ben are not considered appropriate enough for translating some Scripture quotations from the KJV then, if suitable corresponding words are found in the Huifu ben or the Zhongwen yinghuang qinding ben, they will be used as the secondary references for translating those Scripture quotations in my discussions. Besides this, a specific method used to categorize the examples in the discussions is Katharina Reiss’ text type theory, which belongs to the category of theoretical translation studies, and the three text types of Reiss applied to the discussions in the thesis are the informative, the expressive, and the operative text types. “Descriptive translation studies” and “theoretical translation studies” are the two branches of the “pure translation studies.” As a result, adopting the words already existing in the Chinese Bible, especially the Hehe ben, to translate the Scripture quotations from the KJV in The Pilgrim’s Progress can have the following main advantages: firstly, for the Scripture quotations of the informative text type, it allows Chinese readers to strongly resonate with the biblical information and feel that the theological information being transmitted through the Chinese translations is convincing; secondly, for the Scripture quotations of the expressive text type, it retains the metaphors and aesthetic elements from the Chinese Bible, especially the Hehe ben, and makes the thoughts expressed through the Chinese translations easily accepted by Christian Chinese readers; thirdly, for the Scripture quotations of the operative text type, it is possible to successfully persuade the Chinese readers to act in the way that John Bunyan wishes.