Comment On Two Versions Of Jane Eyre

Comment on Two Versions of Jane EyreAbstractJust as the quality of material products must be estimated by customers, so the quality of spiritual works must be evaluated by readers. We should judge merits and demerits in works so as to improve the quality of the whole national spiritual products. Translations are no exception. Translation criticism is the touchstone to evaluate them, and is also an important link between translation theory and practice. Because of certain characteristics of the translating process, critics are only those who are expert at two or more languages. Thus translators also shoulder the burden of examining and criticizing translated works. When his work is issued to the reading public, the translator is supposed to show himself courageous enough to possess the correct approach to criticism, while the critics should stick to comment criteria to evaluate the work in a friendly and realistic way. But to improve translation substantially we should choose world classics as targets because, firstly, they have a large circulation and influence; secondly, many classics have a few versions of different times, which it is beneficial to compare; thirdly, criticism of versions of classic works is beneficial to young translators who should have read them, so that they can follow suit. That's why this present thesis has picked out Jane Eyre .which has enjoyed a prestigious fame.To comment, it is necessary to set up a yardstick, that is to say, comment must be based on a certain theory. Unlike previous comment on translations, this thesis combines Chinese and Western translating theories: in translation principles, it insists on "truthfulness, expressiveness and elegance" put forward by the famous Chinese translation theorist Yan Fu (r^fi) , and in the method of evaluating the translation, it applies pragmatic theories, and functional equivalence formulated by Eugene A. Nida, the well-known translation theoretician of the United States. In the analysis of the translation, this paper comments not only on words, sentences and paragraphs but also on the overall style. We are supposed to take the part and the whole into account."Truthfulness" is the basis on which "expressiveness "is built. There is no expressiveness without correct understanding. Context is the most important factor to understand the text, because it restricts the understanding of the text in many respects. Despite various views by linguists at home and abroad, context, on the whole, consists of linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors. The former is composed of narrow and broad context, and the latter includes social, cultural background and the exact linguistic circumstance in which characters, objects and events are situated. So whether or not the understanding of the original is correct, context can be used to evaluate it."Expressiveness" is to reproduce the original text with another language on the basis of understanding. For a correct expression, it is necessary for the translator to acquire some translating theories and techniques and there are a number of them. This thesis will confine itself to those prominently used in the two versions of Jane Eyre. Eugene A. Nida's superfluous information theory tells us: as target language readers are affected by their social, cultural background, it is necessary to make some additions and omissions sometimes in order for them to feel the same about ihe original text asthe original readers did. Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar tells us: translation from one language into another is a process from the outside to the inside and then from the inside to the outside. The Chinese people and Westerners differ in thinking: the former are apt for concreteness while the latter for abstract thinking, and the former avoid repetition while the latter not. Pragmatic equivalent effect is better applied to languages which belong to different families, especially those whose cultures are far away from each other, like English and Chinese. Pragmatic equivalence involves s...