A study on the Chinese translation validity of Ku Hung-Ming's The Spirit of the Chinese People: Preface
辜鸿铭《春秋大义·序言》汉译效度研究

摘要

辜鸿铭为清末民初中学西进的领军人物，其最具国际影响力的著作是由10篇英语版政论文汇编而成的The Spirit of the Chinese People，中文题名为《春秋大义》，当代国内学者多译作《中国人的精神》。该文集深刻阐释了中华文明的精神与价值，尤其是序言部分，更是突出了中华文明正义与礼法的精髓。迄今为止，国内已出版10多个中文译本。随着越来越多译本的出现，低质重译问题日渐凸显，主要表现为文化误读、专有名词误译、译名不规范等，严重影响了中文读者对该文集的客观评判。本文借助自建英汉平行语料库，运用定性分析与定量分析，并结合各译本中的典型案例，对比较普遍的共性问题展开翻译效度研究。期待本研究能够让中文读者对辜鸿铭及其《春秋大义》有一个全新的认识。

Abstract

As a leading figure in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, Ku Hung-Ming’s most internationally influential work is titled The Spirit of the Chinese People, which consists of 10 English political essays. Ku himself entitled this work a Chinese name called《春秋大义》while most domestic scholars prefer to translated it as《中国人的精神》.This collection of essays deeply elucidates the spirit and values of Chinese civilization, especially its preface, which highlights the essence of righteousness and rules. So far, more than 10 Chinese versions have been published. However, with more and more versions published, issues like low-quality retranslations have become increasingly prominent, mainly manifested in cultural misunderstandings, proper nouns mistranslations, and non-standardized translation terms, which severely affect Chinese readers’ objective judgment of this work. With the help of self-built English-Chinese parallel corpus, this study employs both qualitative and quantitative methods, and combines typical cases from various versions to conduct a translation validity study on the common and universal translation issues. It is hoped that this study will provide Chinese readers with a new understanding of Ku Hung-Ming and his work The Spirit of the Chinese People.