Abstract

The period between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century witnessed all classes in China set off a fervor of learning from the West in the movement for salvation and survival. Instead, Ku Hung-Ming chose to translate China’s outstanding traditional culture and thoughts to the world in the mainstream of learning Western culture. In the modern era, when traditional Chinese culture was in decline, Ku preserved the inheritance of traditional culture domestically and utilized his profound reserves of Western culture to promote the spread of Chinese culture around the world. This is the beginning of the Western world’s understanding of the magnificence of Chinese culture. The characteristics of Ku’s learning from the East and the West and his commitment to disseminating Chinese culture to the world are both reflected in his political treatise “Civilization and Anarchy: Or the Moral Problem of the Far Eastern Question”. However, the existing Chinese translation lacks the quality of classic translations. The word-for-word translation makes it difficult for Chinese readers to extract the cultural information related to the quotation. Therefore, this thesis explores the issue of translation validity of quotations from The Great Learning, Mencius, and The Analects with the guidance of back translation theory and summarizes the necessity of back translation in the issue of classic translation. It is expected that this thesis may provide readers with a renewed understanding of Ku and his good intentions for the transmission and dissemination of the traditional Chinese culture.