The translation is an advanced language art, it will need a long and arduous study and practice to be mastered. In college English learning, whether the five basic skills in the old outline “Listen, speaking, reading, writing, translation, or in the new outline “Reading, listening, speaking, writing, translation”, translation is always the last one, which is to say, the translation is the most difficult to master.
Due to much difference between English and Chinese languages, it is not easy to do the translation perfectly. So how can we do the translation as far as possible to express all the meaning of the original in line with people’s style faithfully ?
People use different languages in oral, written communication, and they always need the help of another medium to make the communication carried out smoothly.
This media is just translation. The translator must have a uniform standard to measure if the translation is good or bad. The modern people has summarized the standard of translation for the concise words: “Loyal, Fluent”. Loyal means to be faithful to the original.
Translator must be accurate and complete expression of original ideas and content, while not add or delete anything or change the meaning arbitrarily, and should absolutely respect the thinking, perspectives, standpoints and personal feelings reflected in the process of narrative, description and description, while not be relying on personal likes and dislikes to wanton distortion, should keep the original style; Fluent means the translation must be normative, easy to understand.
The translator should use the modern languages in a popular style, and do their best to make the translation simple, smooth, fresh and vivid. Regarding to the standard of translation, the British Tytler put forward three principles of translation two hundred years ago: The first is “the meaning of the original should be fully transferred to the translation”, the second is “translation must have the original style and stylistic”, the third is ” translation should be as fluent as the original”.
However, Lin Yutang who was a very famous Chinese litterateur once thought the absolutely loyal translation was even impossible, he said: “the translator can try best to reach to be faithful, but this is so-called faithful , not absolutely faithful, …… 100% loyal is just a dream.
Translation reaching 70% or 80%, even 90% to be loyal, is on the extreme. “All in all, the standard of translation can only be relative, rather than absolute. Of course, we should strive to achieve the highest standard.
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