Investigating Translator Subjectivity in English Translations of Classical Chinese Philosophical Texts: A Corpus-based Comparative Analysis of James Legge, Ku Hung-Ming, and D.C. Lau’s Renditions of the Lunyu

Abstract

This study reveals distinct translational patterns across three seminal English translations of the Lunyu (Analects): Legge’s scholarly religious orientation is manifested through formal equivalence and explicitation strategies, such as ren-dering ‘仁’ (rén) as ‘benevolence’ with extensive philological footnotes; Ku’s cultural mediation approach employs domestication and the systematic religionisation of Confucian concepts, notably framing ‘天’ (tiān) as ‘God’ to resonate with Western spiritual discourse; and Lau’s modern academic stance balances philological precision with contemporary readability by using ‘humaneness’ for ‘仁’ to enhance accessibility. These variations reflect the translators' cultural positioning, historical contexts, and underlying translation motivations. The research examines translator subjectivity through a corpus based comparative framework using AntConc for keyword extraction and UAM Cor-pusTool for semantic prosody analysis. Yang Bojun’s annotated text is adopted as the authoritative Chinese source for its philological rigor, despite its later publication, to ensure a consistent reference for comparing the three historical trans-lations. The Lunyu English Parallel Corpus (Lunyu ECPC) was constructed, incorporating this source text and translations by Legge (1893), Ku (1906), and Lau (1979), with a combined total of 125,000 tokens. Integrating quantitative corpus analysis with qualitative interpretation, this study investigates the lexical, syntactic, and thematic characteristics across the translations.