Accounting for the religionisation in Ku Hung-Ming’s translations of Confucian classics: From culture and identity to narrative

Abstract Ku Hung-Ming (1857–1928) was a unique thinker and translator, who translated Confucian classics into English in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when his Chinese contemporaries engaged in introducing Western ideas into China. Drawing on narrative theory, this article focuses on the issue of religionisation in Ku’s translations of Confucian classics. The aim is twofold. One is to demonstrate how Ku religionises his translations by Christianising Confucianism and promoting religion, and reinterpret the religionisation as anti-secularisation. The other aim is to promote narrative theory as an alternative theoretical framework to the pervasive theorising of translation that relies on the concepts of culture and identity. This article argues that the overreliance on culture in accounting for translation phenomena leads to culturalism in translation studies, which sacrifices academic rigour and originality, while a focus on translator identity follows the model of what I call “diagnostic research,” which exercises a cultural and ideological violence against and brings about the trivialisation of the historical translators we research. It proposes that a narrative paradigm produce more fruitful and productive accounts for translations because it highlights translator agency, emphasises the resistant role of translation, acknowledges the transcendental dimension of human beings, and encourages self-reflexiveness of the researcher.