A Brief Discussion on Cultural Misreading and Translation Reconstruction in James Legge's English Translation of The Analects

Abstract

As a representative figure of nineteenth-century Western missionary sinology, James Legge produced an English translation of the Analects that has long served as a core text through which Western academia engages with Confucian thought. His missionary subjectivity and Christian ethical presuppositions, however, engendered systematic cultural misreading in the translation. Drawing on translator habitus and cultural dissipation theory, and taking classic renderings such as ren bu zhi er bu yun ("not to feel resentful when one is not recognized by others") as entry points, this paper delineates the manifestations of misreading at three levels: surface-level lexical deviation, meso-level conceptual alienation, and deep-level systemic dissolution, and further probes the missionary stance and Western civilizational prejudices underlying them. The study finds that Legge frequently supplanted core Confucian categories with Christian virtue concepts, resulting in the dissipation and distortion of the conceptual substance of Confucianism. In response, this paper proposes a localized path for reconstructing translation strategies, comprising transliteration with annotations for fidelity, restoration of the internal logic of the source classic, and stratified contextual compensation. It advocates a dialectical approach to translations of Chinese classics and calls for preserving the foundational essence of Chinese thought in the outbound translation of Chinese classics.