Modern Social Science Research

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.

Ku Hung-Ming; The Spirit of the Chinese People: Preface; Translation validity