The Tao Te Ching has been translated into Western languages over 250 times, mostly to English, German, and French.[34] According to Holmes Welch, "It is a famous puzzle which everyone would like to feel he had solved."[35] The first English translation of the Tao Te Ching was produced in 1868 by the Scottish Protestant missionary John Chalmers, entitled The Speculations on Metaphysics, Polity, and Morality of the "Old Philosopher" Lau-tsze.[36] It was heavily indebted[37] to Julien's French translation[13] and dedicated to James Legge,[4] who later produced his own translation for Oxford's Sacred Books of the East.[5]
Other notable English translations of the Tao Te Ching are those produced by Chinese scholars and teachers: a 1948 translation by linguist Lin Yutang, a 1961 translation by author John Ching Hsiung Wu, a 1963 translation by sinologist Din Cheuk Lau, another 1963 translation by professor Wing-tsit Chan, and a 1972 translation by Taoist teacher Gia-Fu Feng together with his wife Jane English.
Many translations are written by people with a foundation in Chinese language and philosophy who are trying to render the original meaning of the text as faithfully as possible into English. Some of the more popular translations are written from a less scholarly perspective, giving an individual author's interpretation. Critics of these versions claim that their translators deviate from the text and are incompatible with the history of Chinese thought.[38] Russell Kirkland goes further to argue that these versions are based on Western Orientalist fantasies and represent the colonial appropriation of Chinese culture.[39][40] Other Taoism scholars, such as Michael LaFargue[41] and Jonathan Herman,[42] argue that while they do not pretend to scholarship, they meet a real spiritual need in the West. These Westernized versions aim to make the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching more accessible to modern English-speaking readers by, typically, employing more familiar cultural and temporal references.
Challenges in translation
The Tao Te Ching is written in Classical Chinese, which generally poses a number of challenges for interpreters and translators. As Holmes Welch notes, the written language "has no active or passive, no singular or plural, no case, no person, no tense, no mood."[43] Moreover, the received text lacks many grammatical particles which are preserved in the older Mawangdui and Beida texts, which permit the text to be more precise.[44] Lastly, many passages of the Tao Te Ching are deliberately ambiguous.[45][46]
Since there is very little punctuation in Classical Chinese, determining the precise boundaries between words and sentences is not always trivial. Deciding where these phrasal boundaries are must be done by the interpreter.[45] Some translators have argued that the received text is so corrupted due to its original medium being bamboo strips[47] linked with silk threads—that it is impossible to understand some passages without some transposition of characters.
