The Domestication Strategy Adopted in Ku Hung-ming’s Analects of Confucius and Its Influence

Abstract

Confucianism has been imparted and inherited for thousands of years since its birth in the spring and autumn period and the Warring States period. As a representative work of Confucian classics, the Analects of Confucius play a dominant role in the thousands of years of cultural heritage of the Chinese nation. The foreign version of the Analects of Confucius has also become a necessary book for foreign countries to understand Chinese culture. The English version of the Analects of Confucius published by Ku Hung-ming in 1989, as the first one translated by Chinese, has been discussed by Chinese and foreign scholars for many years.
This paper mainly studies and discusses the main translation strategies adopted by Ku Hung-ming’s version of the Analects of Confucius, domestication translation strategy, its role in translation, specific performance, and the impact of the choice of translation strategies on cultural communication and future translation work. This paper mainly adopts exemplifying and interpreting methods as the main method, supplemented by a small number of contrastive analysis, this paper finds that the English translation of the Analects of Confucius by Ku Hung-ming mainly adopts the domestication translation strategy. This strategy is mainly embodied in the linguistic and culture, and adopts the means of adding translation, deleting, annotation, analogy and so on. Under the guidance of domestication translation strategy, Ku’s English version of the Analects of Confucius reduced the difficulty of reading and understanding for Western readers, made the acceptance much easier. And the work made a great contribution to the international communication of Chinese classics at that time. It is found that the domestication translation strategy can not only reduce the reading difficulty of Western readers, but also inevitably affect the readers’ understanding depth and accuracy of the philosophy in the Analects of Confucius. Under the background of China’s increasing national strength and influence, the translation method based on domestication strategy will inevitably lose part of the ideological connotation of the works, which is no longer suitable for the needs of the times. In the new era, the translation strategies should be adjusted according to the actual situation.