Analysis On Cultural Interpretation Of Da Xue From The Perspective Of Thick Translation

With the tendency of Chinese culture output, China meets great bottlenecks in the export of Confucianism. The reasons are various, the main one of which is language barrier because language is the carrier of culture. Obviously, culture is hard to disseminate with language barrier. To resolve the problem, the key is translation, in that translation has the function of cultural dissemination. This thesis analyses Ku Hungming’s translation of Da Xue to discuss its features, reasons and implications.Thick Translation as a strategy of cultural translation was put forward by Kwame Anthony Appiah in 1993 in his paper titled Thick Translation. An abundant amount of culture is contained in language, which is exactly a Gordian knot for translation. The main strategies of thick translation include commentary, annotation, etc., through which readers may feel as if they are exposed to rich linguistic and cultural contexts.Da Xue is originally the forty-second chapter of Li Ji, which was greatly favored by Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) and recomposed by the famous Neo-Confucianist Chu Hsi. And it then became the first book of the Four Books (Da Xue, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Confucian Analects, and The Works of Mencius). Da Xue, as the introduction of Confucianism, has great cultural and realistic significance. This thesis analyses Ku Hungming’s thick translation of Da Xue using the descriptive method from form and content. Then, the reasons of Ku Hungming’s thick translation are discussed from the following points: ideology, poetics, readership and translator’s subjectivity. Ku Hungming’s translation of Da Xue is exactly the product of the social and personal ideology and the predetermined readers in his mind.