Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the study

Chinese culture and Western culture differ greatly from each other. It is well known that a good understanding of some aspects of a certain culture can undoubtedly facilitate the mastery of a specific language. Furthermore, the Chinese language is very different from English and most of the other European languages in a number of ways. Compared to more than 400 million Chinese learners of English, there are only forty million foreign learners of Chinese around the world, although this number is increasing fast as China is beginning to play an increasingly important role globally. Chinese books and newspaper articles are written in Chinese characters, which are different from the Roman alphabet, and Westerners who are used to reading Romanized script find Chinese characters difficult to master. It usually takes longer for Western learners of Chinese to learn to read Chinese than for Chinese learners to learn to read English.

In some European countries, where citizens have had contact with China through Christian missionaries for centuries, Chinese studies and studies related to China are not new fields of research or interest. In the United States of America, the development of Chinese studies has accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century, and in some fields Americans have surpassed Europeans in research on China (cf. Yu 1997). Various academic institutions offering courses in Chinese studies have in fact been established in the United States, of which the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University are among the most famous.

As the Chinese writing system is fundamentally different from that of most Western languages, difficulties arise for Western learners of Chinese. Very few undergraduate students who have studied Chinese for two or three years are able to read Chinese newspaper articles, let alone Chinese books. Most of the Westerners who are interested in China and wish to learn more about the country and culture have to read English translations of Chinese books or English articles written by researchers on China. Trustworthy translations are therefore immensely important, since they can give readers insight into the source text (hereafter ST) as well as into some of the cultural and historical customs and morals of the source culture.

The Chinese civilization has a history of over 3,000 years, which has left the world with a great number of valuable classics. It is estimated that the number of Chinese classics produced before 1911 was between 80,000 and 100,000. In 2008, the first list of Chinese classics was announced after it had been approved by the State Council. The list included 2,392 books,of which 2,282 were written in Chinese characters and 110 in languages of different minority groups in China. According to a survey, during the one hundred years of the last century, nearly 100,000 Western classics were translated into Chinese, but the number of Chinese classics that were translated into Western languages was only 500 (Wang & Wang 2009: 2). This unbalanced situation suggests that more Chinese books are waiting to be translated and that more qualified translators need to be trained in order to increase Westerners' knowledge of China, since translations of Chinese texts still form the basis of the West's understanding of China.

Literary works are considered an important enhancement of the teaching of Chinese language and culture to foreign learners.Sanguo Yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Three Kingdoms)is the first of the“Four Great Chinese Classics”(cf.2.1).The reasons for choosing Sanguo Yanyi and its translations as the current research topic will be further discussed in 2.5.11. In reference to the two complete English translations, a number of questions immediately arise, such as why the translators undertook such a project, what the translations look like, for whom the translations were made, which translation is more suitable for students of Chinese, what approaches the translators have used to achieve better effects and why a new translation was produced. These questions are central to this study, and will be addressed throughout the subsequent chapters.