The true meaning of Confucius analects in translation

The Analects, a selection of words and deeds of Confucius around 5th century BCE, was compiled by his disciples and later followers. It contains twenty short chapters or books, recording mainly recollections of Confucius’ words and deeds. As a cultural canon, The Analects is probably the most important intellectual source that influences the Chinese mind for two thousand years as the truth expressed by the sage himself. However, the understanding has never been easy because of the inherent ambiguities of The Analects. In the past millennia, Confucian scholars were dedicated to the textual studies of this canon in order to reaffirm what Confucius really said and created a long exegetical tradition. Some elements in this classical Chinese textual scholarship tend to develop diverse interpretations and heated debates, because of the nature of ideographic characters, of syntactical flexibility, and the mutation of meaning in history. The responsibility of interpreting the texts has often shifted from the compilers to the readers, who need to provide contextual information to make sense of the sayings, add links connecting one fragment to another, explain apparent inconsistency between passages, and complete the gaps left by the compilers. The translating of The Analects into European languages started in the 17th century since the Jesuits’ contact with the Chinese scholars. In the process of translating this canon, the translator has to choose only one kind of reading out of many diverse interpretations in the Chinese exegetical tradition. As a result, the opacity of the texts and open-endedness in meaning in the Chinese tradition are lost, and the cultural concepts behind the Chinese words and various Chinese exegetical traditions are ignored. In this study, five outstanding translation versions are selected for comparison: 1) James Legge (1893), the Confucian Analects; 2) Authur Waley (1938), the Analects of Confucius; 3) Ezra Pound (1960, c1951), Confucius: the Great digest, the Unwobbling pivot, the Analects; 4)Dim Cheuk Lau (1992),The Analects (Lun Yu); and 5) Chichung Huang (1997), The Analects of Confucius (Lun Yu). http://www.translation-and-meaning.nl/?page_id=4