Tao Te Ching Essay

With the great number of English translations of the Tao Te Ching coming forth, researches focusing on theses translations have been continuously carried out by Western scholars. Searching key words "Tao Te Ching Translation" in ProQuest, DOAJ, EBSCO (asp / bsp), EBSCO (asc / bsc) and such databases, 55 results belonging to different fields were found. It can be observed that Western scholars paid close attention to a comparative and contrastive study of original text of the Tao Te Ching. Some of them emphasized on the historicity of the Tao Te Ching, while others made comments to the different translations. No matter it is from the perspectives of philosophical ideas or translating strategies, they shared one thing in common, that is the lack of concerning of cultural or political factors in study. To be more specific, some of the main achievements on the research of the English versions of translation of the Tao Te …show more content…
Bebell and Shannon M. Fera, where “the researchers have compiled a database of available English interpretations of the Tao Te Ching” and “have selected specific chapters from a sampling of the interpretations and have compared the interpretations using two distinct methods”(Bebell and Fera, 2000:134). This study systematically compared the differences lied in various English versions of the Tao Te Ching, using qualitative content analysis of seven specific chapters from eight English versions of the Tao Te Ching as well as quantitative holistic analysis of variance existed amongst them, which can be regarded as an early exploration of the new methods to the study of English Tao Te Ching translations. The methods applied in this study, especially the quantitative one, were later adopted and improved by scholars in