Abstract:

As crystallizations of the Chinese nation’s way of thinking, spiritual pursuit and values, traditional Chinese philosophical terms are the keys for other countries and nations in the world to understand China’s traditional culture. Based on the historical variability, interpretability and dynamic contextual characteristics of traditional Chinese philosophical terms and enlightened by the research methods of conceptual history, this paper explores the construction of meaning in translating traditional Chinese philosophical terms from the three perspectives of tracing the “root” to translate the core meaning, tracing the “flow” to translate the historical meaning, and clarifying the “context” to translate the pragmatic meaning with some examples of typical Chinese philosophical terms. Only by constructing a multi-dimensional perspective of history, culture and pragmatics for understanding traditional Chinese philosophical terms can we provide sufficient conditions for grasping the true meaning of terms and then translating them accurately.

Key words: English translation of traditional Chinese philosophical terms, conceptual history, core meaning, historical meaning, pragmatic meaning