James Legge's (1815-1897) translations of the Confucian classics have long been venerated as
the peak and standard of sinological translation with little attention being paid to the
traces of missionary and orientalist discourse within these awesome tomes. This book subjects
Legge's Confucian translations to a postcolonial perspective with a view of uncovering the
subtle workings of colonialist ideology in the seemingly innocent act of translation. Combining
close textual study with rich contextual information the author uses the example of Legge's
two versions of the Zhongyong to illustrate two distinctive stages of his sinological
scholarship: missionary orientalism during his Hong Kong years (1843-1873) culminating in the
production of The Chinese Classics and academic orientalism during his Oxford professorship
(1876-1897) as reflected in his Sacred Books of China. Legge grew hermeneutically more open in
his life-long encounter with the Confucian texts yet his translation did not entirely
transcend the colonialist discourse of the day. This in-depth case study highlights the
importance of taking an ethical stance in cross-cultural translation and has much to offer to
postcolonial translation studies.
