ArticleBook Review http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.11.027
Honoring Cultural Complexities with Strategic Choices and Thorough Reflections: Yue Feng’s and Lin Feng’s A Critical Biography: James Legge (2023)
Lauren F. Pfister
Hephzibah Mountain Aster Academy, Gilpin County, Colorado 80403, USA.
*Corresponding author: Lauren F. Pfister
Published: November 30,2025
Abstract
Professors Yue Feng and Lin Feng’s A Critical Biography: James Legge published in 2023 by Shandong Education Press, China offers a comprehensive and nuanced examination of James Legge’s English translations of ancient Chinese texts. The volume begins with a concise yet insightful biography of Legge, situating his life and scholarly work within the broader historical context of the 19th century. Central to Yue and Lin’s analysis is Legge’s handling of cultural-ly-loaded terms, which posed significant challenges in conveying complex Chinese concepts to a Victorian English-speaking audience. They reveal how Legge employed a “foreignizing” strategy—here termed xenofication—to preserve the distinctiveness of Chinese ideas, at times crafting novel English words to maintain the cultural and conceptual distance between source and target texts. Unlike many scholars who focus on specific texts or domains, Yue and Lin examine Legge’s translations across the Four Books, the Five Classics, Daoist and Buddhist writings, and the Classic of Filial Piety, selecting representative passages to highlight both successes and shortcomings. Their method combines rigorous textual analysis, cultural literacy, and cross-disciplinary insight, producing discussions that are incisive, reflective, and richly informative. The work not only deepens understanding of Legge’s achievements but also provides an essential reference for translation scholars, sinologists, and those engaged in Sino-Western comparative studies, demonstrating the enduring global significance of Legge’s translation legacy.
Keywords
A Critical Biography: James Legge; James Legge; Translation
Copyright
© 2023 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
How to cite this paper
Honoring Cultural Complexities with Strategic Choices and Thorough Reflections: Yue Feng’s and Lin Feng’s A Critical Biography: James Legge (2023)
How to cite this paper: Lauren F. Pfister. (2025). Honoring Cultural Complexities with Strategic Choices and Thorough Reflections: Yue Feng’s and Lin Feng’s A Critical Biography: James Legge (2023). Translation and Foreign Language Learning, 1(4), 753-755.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.11.027