A Study Of The Annotations In Ku Hungming's Translation Of Confucian Classics From The Postcolonial Perspective

Ku Hungming, known as an oddity, is a famous translator and showed great preference to Confucianism. He was devoted to disseminating the Chinese culture over the world in his old age. He translated three of the four Confucian canonical books, the discourse and saying of Confucius (Lun Yu) (1898) and the universal order, or conduct of life (Zhong Yong) (1906) and the Great Learning of Higher Education (Da Xue), who was the first Chinese to introduce Confucian classics to the West independently. Compared with the other versions, Ku's versions had many specialties and his works were the most impressive. He applied annotations frequently: explained the concepts and doctrines with the western cultures and concepts; cited the sayings of western philosopher, liberator in the annotations; made the comparisons on the places and names between China and Europe. He even used the subtitle"a special translation, illustrated with quotations from Goethe and other writers"when translating Zhong Yong. The author thinks Ku Hungming employed the domestication and he adopted domestication in the translation to transmit the Chinese traditional culture. His versions with frequent application of annotations gained the westerns'approval and the activity of translation contributed to the communications between the west culture and the Chinese culture.In the later period of Qing dynasty, China became a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society, greatly declining in politics, economy and culture. In this social context, Ku Hungming devoted himself to disseminating Chinese traditional culture and eliminated the prejudice of the west against the Chinese and the traditional culture, then made them understand the real Chinese civilization. He thought that the excellent culture should be respected and that the western countries shouldn't hold the prejudice against it and even distort it. With the development of postcolonial theory, this theory provides us with the new perspective to reexamine Ku Hungming's versions. The author thought, taking the social and political environment into consideration, Ku's versions embody a sense of fighting against cultural colonization. In the postcolonial context, domestication is mainly used as a way powerful country transmitted its ideology and culture to the weak culture, so it usually is considered as a tool of cultural colonization, weakening the characteristic and difference of the target culture and then making the target culture adapt to the powerful cultural environment. However, taking the social, historical and political factors into account, the thesis argues that domestication Ku adopted in the translation can resist the hegemonic culture and propagate the national culture. Through translation, cultural identity can be established.Postcolonial theory can explain why Ku Hungming chose to translate the Confucianism, citing the western culture to explain Confucian classics. In the postcolonial context, the thesis, based on the postcolonial theory, investigates the cultural environment of the versions, the purpose and the strategy of translation, and the effects of the versions on the target language and culture, and then confirms that domestication plays an effective role in resisting cultural colonization and establishing cultural identity. Although Ku's translation is not enough to draw China out of the state of invasions, it is still beneficial to reconstruct the positive China image and to shape the cultural identity.The thesis is divided into five parts. Part One serves as introduction to the origin of research, the motivation and significance of the research, guiding theory of the research as well as the organization of the thesis. Part Two presents the postcolonial theory, its key concepts, Eurocentrism, cultural identity, as well as the role of translation in the postcolonial context. Part Three provides a brief introduction to Ku Hungming, his viewpoints on the western and Chinese culture and the cultural environment of the versions. Part Four firstly deals with the characteristics of Ku's interpretations and the purpose of frequent application of annotations in a postcolonial context, then mainly explores Ku's attempt to seek the west's approval with the strategy of domestication in the interpretation of Confucian classics and the effects of his versions. The issue is discussed from the following three aspects: the linguistic dimension, the culture dimension and the literature dimension. He aimed at propagating Chinese traditional culture and gaining the approval, hoping to shape the positive cultural identity. The last part, the concluding part makes a summary of the thesis.