| The role of translation criticism in translation studies has long been marginal due to the deficiency of academic research, and the uncertainty of critical criterion. Influenced by traditional Chinese poetics and aesthetics, translation judgments are usually intuitive, subjective and impressionistic, rather than objective and systematic in the analysis of translation.This exemplifies itself in a proclivity to categorize with reference to "good" translations as opposed to "bad" ones. Furthermore, most translation judgments seem to remain the simple task of "correcting the errors of words". The situation has not changed much in spite of the rapid growth of translation studies in the past twenty years .Fortress Besieged, the English translation of Weicheng (《围城》) written by Qian Zhong-shu(钱钟书), was published in 1979 by Indiana University Press. It achieved a great success with a warm welcome and was awarded one of "the most outstanding academic works" by The American Books Association from 1980 to 1981. Meanwhile, the book also met some depreciative criticisms at home and abroad, such as mistranslation, inadequacies, impure English and rigid cultural transplantation. These criticisms, with the criterion of "domestication", put forward their comments mainly from the perspective of the TL readers, leaving out the consideration of the translators' intention and their choice of translation strategies.This paper endeavors to root out the bias by studying the translators' effort in all the places of 202 notes so as to identify their translation strategy and the reasons lying behind it. The findings show that the principle held in the translation is "foreignization above domestication"; and that the translators tried their best to preserve and convey "the ST characteristics" both in its linguistic forms and cultural elements, rather than "surrender to or compromise with the TT readers". In accordance with this, a reassessment of the reviews is offered, making a few discoveries.
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