On Debates About Translation Theories Around The May Fourth Period

Translation debates exist along the Chinese translation history of thousands of years while seldom can be short-listed due to the scales, materials, quality and so on. Among the translation climaxes in history, the climax around the May Forth Movement dwarfs the others in many aspects such as arguers, categories, quality, etc. There emerged lots of talent scholars, excellent in both Chinese and foreign language and literature, driven by a strong sense of history responsibility and the great effort of saving their motherland by literature and thoughts, expressed their own opinions about "what to translate? How to translate?", leading to sharp debates in that period.This thesis consists of three chapters, trying to make a classification and an analysis of so much different translation thoughts and theories of so many people around the May Forth Movement period, attempting to find out the real core of all these translation debates under the history influences. Chapter One discusses the debate of the translating language: to use ancient or modern Chinese affected by political and social events. Chapter Two deals with the debate of translating the literature of small countries which suffered similar destiny like China or the top and classical literature in human history. Chapter Three probes into the status and self-perfection of translation.Bound into the specific history period, although the debates around the May Forth Movement seemed to focus on translation issues, the core actually is a literature and cultural debate. All sides in the debate aimed at a same purpose: to change the old country into a brand new and promising one by translating and introducing advanced foreign thoughts and literature, but their separating opinions on the means of procedure led to the huge debates.