Recreating the Images of Chan Master Huineng

COLLECTIONS:
Complete Collection
​South & East Asia Collection​

The book applies systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to the comparison of four English translations of the Platform Sutra (1930, 1977, 1998 and 2011).

The focus of the book is on the image of Huineng recreated in each translation and the linguistic means by which these images are achieved.

The author demonstrates, for instance, that the translations by Cheng and Wong, by qualifying many of the statements through median- and low-valued modality, convey an image of Huineng as cautious and un-threatening, while those of Cleary and Heng, by relying more on imperative clauses to issue commands, create an impression of Huineng as being more direct and powerful. The author also discusses the possible reasons for producing different images of Huineng by taking into consideration both textual and contextual factors and attributes this to differences in the social distance between the translators and their target readers. Expanding the research subject from words to images, the author also investigates how the illustrations on the covers of two of the translations reinforce the image conveyed by those particular translations.

The book integrates quantitative and qualitative analyses, adopting corpus linguistic tools such as SysFan, SysConc, and Wmatrix, with its methodology applicable in future studies. The analyses of the four translations are conducted from the perspectives of verbs of saying, personal pronouns, Mood and Modality, multimodality and evaluation, and textual complexity, which are within the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of SFL respectively. Both the recreating of images and the lexicogrammatical choices are further interpreted by taking the context of translation (Field, Tenor, Mode) into consideration.

The book provides an appropriate way to combine systemic functional linguistics with translation studies, highlighting the relationship between language, culture and translation. It also raises questions concerning the status/validity of translated texts as the basis of scholarly research in the English world.