Translation, Reception and Canonization of The Art of War: Reviving Ancient Chinese Strategic Culture

The Art of War by Sun Tzu is an ancient yet invaluable Chinese military classic that is still relevant today. This book presents a systematic and in-depth investigation into the translation and reception of The Art of War in Western strategic culture.

Aided by three self-built corpora, this book adopts a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative analysis, and takes both the core text and its paratexts of The Art of War into consideration. The author highlights the significance of proper approaches to translating culture in regards to the core text and effective measures of culture reconstruction in regards to the paratexts. It is revealed by this investigation that the translated Sun Tzu has undergone three major stages before its canonization in Western discourse. The findings bring to light the multiple factors that contribute to the incorporation of Sun Tzu’s strategic wisdom into Western culture.

For scholars interested in translation studies, (critical) discourse analysis, as well as strategic studies, this book provides fresh insights and new perspectives.

Tian Luo is Professor of Translation Studies at Southwest University, China. He received his PhD Degree in Linguistics (English) at the University of Macau in 2017. His research interests fall into the fields of military translation history, discourse analysis approach to translation studies, and corpus-based translation studies. His publications include several monographs, textbooks in English-Chinese translation and more than 30 articles in journals such as Perspective, Babel and LANS-TTS. He is currently leading a research project sponsored by the National Social Science Foundation of China after the completion of three other projects.