Interlingual Realization : A Systemic Functional Perspective on the Tao Te Ching English Translations

This study explores English translations of the Tao Te Ching in terms of interlingual realization, a systemic functional perspective on translation involving two sub-processes: de-realization and re-realization. In this model, the translator first de-realizes the source text from source language phonology/graphology to context, finding the intersection of the source language context and the target language context, and then re-realizes it into target text from the target language context to target language phonology/graphology. Two dimensions are to be considered in interlingual realization—stratification and rank. The source text can be re-realized by translation equivalence and translation shift at any stratum or rank of the target language in the target text, where typically translation equivalence at a higher level stratum or rank is valued higher than equivalence at a lower level.


Introduction
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a theory of multiple hierarchical and complementary relations, where realization, instantiation and individuation are theoretical resources of exploring language patterns (Martin & Wang, 2008).Realization is a scale of abstraction, where each stratum gets recorded as another.It consists of two types, namely, realization between strata and realization within stratum.Realization between strata abstracts language into expressive plane and content plane, in which the former includes phonology/graphology, and the latter contains lexicogrammar and discourse semantics.Context is a higher stratum outside language system, consisting of context of situation and context of culture in Hallidayan sense, or register, genre and ideology according to Martin.Lower strata realize higher ones.Realization is a bi-directional dialectical relation (Hasan, 1995): a top-down relation of determination or activating, which is a sort of probabilistic meaning and a bottom-up relation of construal.Stratification of this kind involves metaredundancy: genre is a pattern of register patterns, which are in turn patterns of discourse semantics patterns and so on (Martin, 2009).Realization within stratum is manifested as rank.For example, within the stratum of lexico-grammar, the rank scale is clause, group/phrase, word and morpheme, where higher-ranking units are realized by lower ones (see Figure 1).
Translation studies based on SFL have developed dramatically since the recent thirty or forty years (Li, 2013).Halliday has defined translation as "guided creation of meaning", regarding translation as a process of seeking equivalence.If meaning is a function in context, then equivalence of meaning is equivalence of function in context (Halliday, 1992, p. 16); he also proposed the systemic functional typology of equivalence according to three vectors of stratification, metafunction and rank, pointing out that different strata, metafunctions and ranks may carry different values in each instance of translation, for example, in the aspects of stratification, context equivalence is valued the most highly (Halliday, 2001).Matthiessen (2001) and Steiner (2001Steiner ( , 2005) ) involved the hierarchy of instantiation and proposed the instantiation-stratification matrix, regarding translation as the reconstrual of meaning and considering that translation should seek for metafunction and context equivalence.

Interlingual Realization
Discussing realization in terms of translation necessarily involves bilingual or multilingual exchange, thus we can name it interlingual realization, which consists of two sub-processes: de-realization and re-realization.Specifically, along the realization axis, the translator first departs from source language (SL) phonology/graphology, de-realizing source text (ST) from expressive plane to SL context of culture, finding the intersection of SL context and target language (TL) context, and then re-realizes it into target text (TT), the phonology/graphology stratum of TL.
Translation cannot be located only at one stratum along the hierarchy of stratification-it takes place throughout the hierarchy (Matthiessen, 2001, p. 89).Or rather, we might say that, in most cases, translation takes place within the content system of language, which is above the expression system of phonology (graphology or sign), and within lexicogrammar, within semantics and within context.But there also are circumstances, though rare, that translation may happen within the expression system, say phonological stratum, for example, the translation of poetry.Just as what Catford (1965) discussed, the "phonological translation" and "graghological translation", and what Matthiessen (2001, p. 89) has added, the translation of sign, or "signal translation" What we are trying to say is that the nature of translation changes depending on where we locate translation along the hierarchy of stratification.The lower the stratum, the more "literal" it will be, and the higher the stratum, the more "free" it will be, as illustrated in Figure 2. In SFL, the most evident dimension of language could be considered as its compositional structure, i.e. constituency (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p. 5).That is to say, language is structured in compositional hierarchies, which are called "ranks", or indeed "rank scales".Every language features a grammatical rank scale (ibid, p. 9).English, typical for many languages, show four hierarchic constructions including sound (in ordinary speech), verse, writing and grammar.Phonological, graphological and lexico-grammatical constituencies are constituted by a hierarchy of units, also known as ranks.Each compositional layer consists of four different ranks (ibid, p.20): (1) phonological: (1a) (sound) tone-foot (rhythm)-syllable-phoneme (1b) (verse) stanza-line-foot (metric)-syllable (2) graphological: sentence-sub-sentence-word (written)-letter (3) lexicogrammatical: clause-phrase/group-word-morpheme (4) semantic: sequence-figure -element (5) contextual: ideology-genre-register Free Literal Concerning the graphological constituency, we can identify a higher unit than sentence, which is "paragraph".Similarly, within lexicogrammar, a unit above clause may also be discerned, i.e. "clause complex".Each rank consists of units of the rank below, for example, in phonology (sound), a tone is composed of feet, a foot of syllables, a syllable of phonemes.
In terms of translation, the equivalence at different ranks corresponds to different translation strategies.For example, the higher the rank, the freer the strategies will be, and the low the rank, the more literal it will be.Catford (1965, p. 24-25) acknowledges equivalence at all strata and distinguishes between "rank-bound translation", where TL equivalents are deliberately at the lowest ranks, i.e. word or morpheme, and "unbounded translation", in which shifts normally occur up and down the rank.Halliday (2001, p. 16) admits that although equivalence tends to be valued differently according to different strata and ranks, usually more at higher strata and ranks, there may be occasions when equivalence at lower ranks can acquire a higher value.

Analysis of the Tao Te Ching English Translations
Tao Te Ching, as the most frequently translated Chinese classic only next to the Bible, has obtained a widespread and diversified Western audience, appealing to readers on a variety of levels.There are over 130 English translations and re-translations of the Tao Te Ching (Xin, 2008, p.17), which are classified according to time into three intensified translation periods: The first period , the second period , and the third period .Below we will use take the Tao Te Ching English translation as a case study to illustrate interlingual realization in terms of stratification and rank.

Phonological Stratum
Translation, as noted previously, mostly takes place in the content plane of the hierarchy of stratification, and rarely in the expressive plane.However, our corpus the Tao Te Ching is recognized widely as poetry in style, philosophical poetry, to be more specific.Therefore, translation at the phonological stratum is possible.But, even so, it is a possibility at a very low degree, because two languages fairly unlikely to have similar articulation system, especially languages like Chinese and English, unless quoting the pronunciation of the source language (like Ellen Marie Chen's (1989) translation, quoting very frequently of the pronunciation of Chinese, and examples will be seen below).Hence, what we called the equivalence at the phonological stratum is relative equivalence in terms of rhyme, which is the primary feature of poetry.We selected Ellen Marie Chen's (1989) translation to show the more exact equivalence, and James Legge's (1891) translation to show the more relative one, both giving priority to the poetic nature of the text, to analyze translation at the phonological stratum.
Most of the translators have agreed the style of the Tao Te Chingas poetry, and some of them even mainly concerned for such style in translation, for example, Guin (1997, p. ix) stated in the her introduction: The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry.I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty.Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through.And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning.It is truth.We have that on good authority.
For phonological equivalence at an exact sense, we can see Chapter 1 " Chen's (1989) translation, where she quoted pronunciations of some of the key concepts at the end of each line, remaining the original rhyme: Therefore, always (ch'ang) without desire (wu-yü), In order to observe (kuan) the hidden mystery (miao); Always (ch'ang) with desire (yu-yü), In order to observe the manifestations (chiao).
For phonological equivalence at a relative sense, we can see, for example, in Chapter 6 "谷 。", the original rhyme is in the pattern of AABBCC.Most of the translations choose to re-realize its meaning instead of its rhyme, for example, Feng & English's (1972) translation: The valley spirit never dies; It is the woman, primal mother.
Her gateway is the root of heaven and Earth.
It is like a veil barely seen.
Use it; it will never fail.
This might because, on the one hand, that it is difficult to do rhyming, and on the other hand, even harder to preserve its original meaning and at the same timemaintaining phonological equivalence.Let's see James Legge's translation, which is widely acknowledged as one that is good at rhyming: The valley spirit dies not, aye the same; The female mystery thus do we name.
Its gate, from which at first they issued forth, Is called the root from which grew heaven and earth.
Long and unbroken does its power remain, Used gently, and without the touch of pain.
This translation follows the AABBCC pattern of rhyme by same/name, forth/earth, remain/pain, but in order to create such rhyme, Legge is not so faithful in re-realization by adding something that does not exist in the original.For example, "aye the same" "from which at first they issued forth" and "and without the touch of pain", which all do not exist in the ST.The translation adds more meaning to the original, which is not equivalent in the discourse semantic stratum in a strict sense.Besides, in terms of the lexicogrammatical stratum, it is also non-equivalent, as the ST uses the word order of "Subject ^ Predicator", while the TT uses the pattern of emphasis which is "Predicator ^ Subject", as in "from which grew heaven and earth".In contrast,let's see another translation by an anonymous translator, who translates better than Legge, because there are no additional meaning for the purpose of rhyming, and at the same time, kept the original rhyme pattern AABBCC: The Goddess Dale is deathless The Nature's access

Whose birth
The root of the heavens and the earth.

Ranges of them in existence
Free to be filled hence

Lexicogrammatical Stratum
There are TTs that are equivalent to ST concerning lexicogrammar (either in terms of lexis or grammar), but shift regarding meaning.First let's see examples of lexical equivalence.In Chinese idioms, we prefer to use specific number to represent an unspecified large quantity, in the Tao Te Ching for example, numbers like "five" "six" "ten thousand" "hundred" have appeared in Chinese concepts like "wu se (五色, five colors literally)" "liu qin (六亲, six relatives literally)" "wan wu (万物, ten thousand things literally)" "bai xing (百姓, hundred families literally)".Actually, they do not mean specific numbers of five, six, ten thousand or one hundred, but general ones to stand for many.There are two strategies in translating these concepts, one is literal, and the other is free.For example: Chapter 5: Ellen Marie Chen (1989): Heaven and earth are not humane (jen), They treat the ten thousand beings as straw dogs (ch'u kou).
The sage is not humane (jen), He treats the hundred families as straw dogs (ch'u kou).
Chang Chung-yuan (1975): Heaven and earth are not benevolent: They treat ten thousand things indifferently.
The wise is not benevolent: He treats men indifferently.
He Guanghu et al. (1985): Heaven and Earth cannot be called benevolent letting all things emerge or perish of themselves.
The sage cannot be called benevolent letting all people live or die The five colors blind a person's eyes; The five musical notes deafen a person's ears; The five flavors ruin a person's taste buds.
Numerous sounds make man unable to hear.
Numerous tastes make man tasteless.
Beautiful music causes deafness.
Delicious food causes loss of taste.
Chapter 18: Ellen Marie Chen (1989): When the six relations are not in harmony, There are filial piety (hsiao) and parental love (tz'u).
Chang Chung-yuan (1975): As soon as the members of a family are no longer at peace, There is a demand for filial piety and love.
He Guanghu et al. (1985): When a family falls into dispute, Filial piety and parental affection to children will be advocated.
to the above examples, we can see that Ellen Marie Chen's translation is most equivalent to ST in terms of lexicogrammar by using literal translation of these numbers, whereas the translation of He Guanghu et al. is the most unequivalent at lexicogrammatical stratum by translating the genuine meaning of these numbers, and Chang Chung-yuan's translation rests in between.
Following, let's look into examples of grammatical equivalence, reflecting most evidently in syntactic structures.We will take P.J. Maclagan's (1898) translation as an example.According to Wang (2001), the most prominent feature of his rendering is its word-for-word translation method.Besides keeping the same sentence structure of the original, transliteration is also used frequently in dealing with keywords (Wang, 2001).For comparison, we will also look at Arthur Waley's (1934) translation: Maclagan (1898): The highest Teh was (as if) no teh, and there was teh.
The lowest Teh would not resign teh, and so there was no teh.

Arthur Waley (1934):
The man of highest "power" does not reveal himself as a possessor of "power"; Therefore he keeps his "power".
The man of inferior "power" cannot rid it of the appearance of "power"; Therefore he is in truth without "power".He who aims at life achieves death.
Even though Maclagan's (1898) translation is more equivalent at the syntax level, the meaning is quite hard to catch for TL readers with separate words without logical relation, which is distorted at the semantic level.However, Waley's (1934) is opposite, meaning is kept although with lexicogrammatical shift.Therefore, Waley's translation is valued higher than Maclagan's.

Discourse Semantic Stratum
There are cases where TT is equivalent in terms of meaning, that is, at the discourse semantic stratum, but shifts in terms of lexicogrammar.For example, in Chapter 6 "谷神不死，是谓玄牝。", most of the translators re-individuate "谷神 (gu shen)" and "玄牝 (xuan pin)" into "Valley Spirit" and "Mysterious Female", which seems equivalent at the lexicogrammatical stratum, but quite difficult for the readers to understand, or even inclines to mislead the audience from the true meaning.Through de-realization to the Chinese context of culture, in which Lao Tzu is an atheist, and hence "gu shen" is not deity, but the great Tao constituted by the texture and property of Tao.As the status of Tao is similar to nihility, it is so called "gu (谷 valley)" as a metaphor, and as Tao is subtle and infinite, it is called "gu shen" (Valley Spirit as the literal translation) as an analogy."pin (牝)"refers to the female reproductive organ, and "xuan pin (玄牝)" gains the connotation of gestating mysteriously, which means that Tao gives birth to everything but is never seen how.That is why such metaphor is made.In Gu Zhengkun's (1995) translation, he found the correct intersection of SL context and TL context, and re-realized it into: The Tao never dies; It is a deep womb.
The re-realization of "Tao" and "deep womb"not only avoids tactically the misunderstanding brought to TL readers by using the word "spirit", but also exerts vividly Tao's maternity of breeding, which is much closer to the naive materialism of the author Lao Tzu.

Context Stratum
In terms of genre, the context stratum, there are discussions about whether the Tao Te Ching belongs to the monologue or dialogue type of article.Compared with the Analects of Confucius, which is Quotation (or Recorded utterances or Saying) in genre, marked by the expression of "(孔)子曰 (Confucius said)", and dialogues in some of the chapters like questions by the students and answers by Confucius, the Tao Te Ching has no such explicit dialogue characteristics as the Analects of Confucius has.But it could also be classified as Quotation invisible of the marked words like "老子曰 (Lao Tzu said)".Such omission is reasonable because the Tao Te Ching is written by Lao Tzu himself, unlike the Analects of Confucius, whichis composed by Confucius's students in the tone of their teacher.For the dialogue feature, we could define it in a broader sense, viewing the addresser and addressee as "present" or "absent".The Analects of Confucius thus belongs to the present one, while the Tao Te Ching belongs to the absent one, reflected in the text by the great number of rhetorical questions which imply communication with potential readers.
However, there is a translation making such marked words visible, that is Shi Fu Hwang (1987), who add "Lao Tze says" at the beginning of each chapter, making it explicitly a Quotation.This could be viewed as an attempt to maintain genre equivalence by shifting at discourse semantics stratum, for example, in Chapter 1Understanding The Tao:

Lao Tze says,
The Tao is that on which one can always tread.
That on which one cannot always tread is not the Tao.
And fame is that of which one can always remember.
That of which one cannot always remember is not fame.
For example, the title of Chapter 52 "归元" (gui yuan, literally in English: return origin), which is a verbal group in Chinese, with "gui" as the Head, and "yuan" as its postmodifier, belonging to the rank of group/phrase in lexicogrammar.Its diversified translations are listed below in Table1: According to the above data, there are two translations re-realize the verbal group "gui yuan" by clause complex, twelve by (infinite) clause, four by group/phrase (nominal group), and three by word.Although the English versions are diversified across ranks, there is a degree of faithfulness for these translations: the most faithful ones are versions translated by clause, like 1-4, 7-9, 11-12, 18; the next faithful ones are by clause complex, like 13, 14; translations by group/phrase and word are far from the meaning of the ST.Therefore, the verbal group in Chinese is better translated by the clause rank in English.However, the infinite clause using verb-ing form in the translation could be viewed as an attempt to achieve nominalization, which from another perspective, could be seen as a downward rankshift to the group/phrase rank scale (grammatical metaphor), which corresponds to the verbal group rank of the ST.

Conclusion
This paper proposed interlingual realization, a new systemic functional perspective on translation, involves de-realization and re-realization, meaning that in the translation activity, translators experience the process of moving from SL phonology/graphology to SL context, finding the intersection of the SL context and the TL context, and then moving from TL context to TL phonology/graphology.During re-realization, translation equivalence and translation shift may be achieved at any stratum or any rank of the TL, but typically, equivalence at a higher stratum or rank is valued higher than that at a lower level.In the case study of the Tao Te Ching, we looked at the translation equivalence and shift achieved at phonological stratum, lexicogrammatical stratum, discourse semantics stratum and context stratum, verifying that equivalence at the higher discourse semantics or context stratum is much more highly valued than equivalence at phonological or lexicogrammatical stratum.The exploration of the translation of the chapter title in terms of rank tell us that the ST can be re-realized through expressions at different ranks, but typically, translation re-realized by expressions at a certain rank scale between two languages is higher than any other.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Stratification in relation to "free" and "literal" translation

Table 1 .
Different translations of "gui yuan"