A Study On English Translation Of Lunyu By Ku Hungming From The Meaning Perspective Of Post Wittgenstein

Lunyu is the representative of Confucianism and attracts more and more attention of the scholars at home and abroad in the process of culture communication. Since the late 19 thcentury, with the trend of “learning from the West”, many Chinese scholars has put their efforts in learning from western culture. Ku Hungming paved a new way—translating Chinese Confucian classics and introducing them to the West. In 1898,Ku Hungming published his English translation of Lunyu in Shanghai, named as The Discourse and Sayings of Confucius: A New Special Translation Illustrated by Goethe and Other European Writers. Ku Hungming’s translation of Lunyu was the first one that was done by Chinese people independently and completely. With his mastery in both Chinese and English, Ku Hungming made a perfect fusion of the Chinese culture and the western culture. Ku Hungming’s translation of Lunyu grasped the essence of Chinese ancient culture and promoted the culture communication between China and the western world.In the middle 20 th century, famous Austria-born English philosopher Wittgenstein put forward the theory of “language games”. On the basis of language game theory,Wittgenstein also introduced the thoughts of “meaning in use”, “forms of life” and“game rules”. Wittgenstein’s new thoughts in philosophy paved a new way for the followers and helped the scholars in philosophy field find a new direction of research.The main thoughts of Wittgenstein are as followed: firstly, Wittgenstein held that meaning is the soul of language. The meaning of a word is in its use. To understand the real meaning of a word or a sentence, we must take the context into consideration.Secondly, the meaning of language is rooted in all kinds of forms of life. “Forms of life” are diversified and flexible. To grasp the real meaning of language, we are bound to find the exact form of life. Last but not the least, from the perspective of “language games”, the use of language should obey the rules like obeying the rules in a game.There are mainly three rules: grammatical rule, meaning rule and pragmatic rule.Among these three rules, pragmatic use is the most important.This paper takes the “meaning in use” theory as the perspective to do a research on Ku Hungming’s use of methods and strategies in translating Lunyu. The research will focus on Ku Hungming’s way of dealing with the transferring of meanings between different languages and also will analyze the reasons why Ku Hungming used such kind of translation methods by descriptive studies and comparative studies. Firstly, from the perspective of meaning of language, Ku Hungming adopted the strategy of domestication and interpreted Chinese culture with the western culture. Ku Hungming made the western readers as his target readers and used a flexible way to deal with the transferring of meanings between different languages, thus promoting the readers’ understanding of the key words and ambiguous words in Lunyu. Secondly, in order to avoid the culture barriers between China and the West, Ku Hungming made a flexible transfer of the forms of life in the source language and the target language. He adopted the method of making analogies between the two kinds of cultures, adding annotations to help the readers understand the source language and omitting the proper names that may arise misunderstanding for the western readers. In this way, the target readers feel close to the culture of the source context and their misunderstanding of Chinese culture will be removed and corrected. Lastly, from the perspective of pragmatic rules of language, we deeply study the historical background and the social factors that contributed to Ku Hungming’s translation of Lunyu.The domestic research on the English translation of Lunyu mainly focused on the aspects like “translators’ subjectivity”, “fusion of horizons”, “hermeneutics” and so on.In the aspect of philosophy, the studies from the theory of “interpretation of ancient texts” are common. The research from other aspects of philosophy is rare to see. This paper takes Wittgenstein’s philosophy as the perspective to analyze the English translation of Lunyu by Ku Hungming. The idea is creative and there hasn’t been a scholar done the research before. The research will offer a new direction for the study on English translation of Lunyu on the one hand, and on the other hand, it will enrich the uses of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and promote the pragmatic use of Wittgenstein’s theories in the field of translation.