James Legge And Ku Hungming’s Culture Identities And Their Translation Of The Analects

Confucianism is one of the most influential philosophies in China, while The Analects is the masterpiece of Confucianism. It has profound influence in China for more than2000years; it has become one of the most authoritative literary classics in the history of China. Since the19th century, there are30English versions of The Analects published, and among them, Legge and Ku Hungming’s versions are far more important; their versions stand for two peaks of English translation of The Analects. Because of their different culture identities, they have different translation purposes and translation strategies. This paper tries to make a comparative study of Legge and Ku Hungming’s versions of The Analects from the perspective of translator’s culture identity, discuss the different historical backgrounds of Legge and Ku Hungming and reveal the decisive effect of translator’s culture identity on the two translators’ translation purposes, translation strategies and methods.This paper explores the culture identities of the two translators and how their culture identities are reflected in their translation. Through a comparative study, it is revealed that different culture identities do have impact on both translators’translation strategies and translation styles. Legge is a missionary and his translation of The Analects is for the purpose of promoting his missionary work, and so he chooses scholarly translation and literal translation strategies, trying every effort to keep the form and meaning correspondent to the original texts. Therefore, his translation is plain and stiff, full of written language and formal and rigorous sentence structures. Ku Hungming is an ethnic Chinese, who wants to seek ways to save the western culture from degeneration. He is attracted by Chinese culture, but dissatisfied with the versions translated by Legge and other missionaries, so he translates The Analects in his own style. Ku Hungming tries to express the real Chinese culture and literature, especially the real Confucianism. He basically uses domesticating translation strategies. His translation highly stresses the literacy of the text and reveals the style of original texts, thus the language of his version is fluent and authentic, just like a beautiful literary work with high readability. To sum up, the translator’s culture identities can pose a great impact on their translation purposes, choice of strategies and methods. It is expected that the study of Legge and Ku’s culture identities and translation strategies might have some inspirations for the study of the translation of Chinese classics.