训诂见英译:以《中庸》21章为例

On the Art of Archi-Hermeneutics Applied to English Translation: With Chapter 21 of The Heart Ever Presencing as an Example

训诂向为经文解释活动,很少被用于语际翻译。汉字“以义构形”,解析其形可达其指。对《中庸》21章汉英译文的分析可见,由字转向词,所形成的概念化倾向,对天道加以抽象并使之与人相疏离,造成增字解经,倾向上即已脱离经文正规;而英译的处理更甚:在以目的语中的给定词语再现经文意义的情况下,已成另一种脉络。回到字本身,以之为本位传译,不仅是语内的基本要求,而且也意味着语际交流的历史使命。一个应对的办法就是通过形训,拆解关键字进而以相应的英语词语对其重加组合,让文字本身说话,将天道之理凸显于译文之中。

Long having been an activity of interpretation of Ruist scriptures,xungu(训诂)is rarely used in interlingual translation,though it is often used in forcusing on thes tructural form of the given characters where their references lie.An analysis of the Chinese and English versions of Chapter21of The Heart Ever Presencing shows that the tendencyt o conceptualize the things concerned coming along with the turn from Chinese characters to words,abstracting the Dao of Tian(天道)and alienating it from man,leads to a heapo f words more than needed,going far away from the right course of what there is in theb ooks.What can be found in their English counterparts is worse.For using the given words in the target language to represent their meaning,what they get to is another context.Thus,i t becomes a must to return to the characters themselves and take them as an orientation to convey the intention of the texts—this is not only the demand for the interlingual renditionb ut it also means a historical mission.One approach to the problem is,abiding by the inter⁃p retation by the structural formation of the characters,to disassemble and then remake upthe parts with corresponding words in English to“let the characters speak for themselves”,a nd thus embody the Dao in the translated text.