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Chinese translator with voice12/29/2023 ![]() Zhu Xi’s commentary edition of Daxue was one of the most important texts for education and the civil service examinations in China’s feudal society and had a profound influence on Chinese intellectuals for hundreds of years. After the edition and rearrangement by Zhu Xi (1130–1,200), the renowned Chinese scholar of the Song Dynasty, it gained its position as an independent “book” and was canonized as one of the so-called Four Books along with Lunyu (《论语》, The Analects), Zhongyong (《中庸》, The Doctrine of the Mean), and Mengzi (《孟子》, Mencius). The Chinese classic Daxue (《大学》, The Great Learning) was originally a section of Liji (《礼记》 The Book of Rites), an anthology of treatises on rituals which came into shape around the first century BCE. It is hoped that the results of this research will contribute to an enhanced understanding of the translation and overseas dissemination of the Chinese classic Daxue, and further the study of the translator’s voice with the aid of corpus technology. This study demonstrates that the translator’s voice, which is always present along with the author’s voice and may take various forms, is deeply associated with the cultural and ideological constructs in which the act of translation is embedded. The findings suggest that each translator’s cultural identity, historical background, and motives for producing the translation are made manifest through various linguistic and non-linguistic choices. Paratexts of translation-prefaces, introductions, translator’s notes, footnotes, and so on, as well as representative examples, were also analyzed by close reading. WordSmith 8.0, CLAWS POS Tagger, and Readability Analyzer were used to analyze the data and investigate the lexical, syntactic, and textual features of the translations of Daxue by David Collie, James Legge, Ku Hungming, Ezra Pound, Chan Wing-Tsit, and Andrew Plaks, respectively. ![]() This study is based on a self-constructed bilingual parallel corpus which adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to reveal the translator’s voice in six English versions of the Chinese classic Daxue. By tracing a set of textual cues, the translator’s voice embedded in the discourse may come to light. The Translator’s voice is the “second” voice in a translated narrative. ![]()
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