Improvement On Chesterman’s "Five Models" Of Translation Ethics

For over a thousand years, translation studies have been centered on fidelity whichbelongs to the traditional translation ethics. Researchers mostly focus on the equivalence ofthe translation to the original. Therefore, translation theories during that period of time like“principles of translation” from Tytler concern the prescription of a translation activity.However, limitations of prescriptive translation studies have been gradually revealedwhile factors concerning politics, rights, manipulation and genders are exposed intranslation studies. Hence, translation studies have been turned to descriptive methodologywhich has interpreted fidelity from multiple ways like ideology, feminism, manipulationand so on. Without being limited to the text level, translation studies have been brought tothe social and cultural aspect. Under such background, it’s of great importance to bringtranslation ethics back to the attention of researchers.Translation scholars at home and aboard have put forward their different opinions ontranslation ethics, among which Chesterman’s “Five models” on translation ethics is themost influential and systematic. Based on the current studies on Chesterman’s translationethics, the author intends to analyze the essence and interrelationships among each model,and then tries to improve Chesterman’s theory on the basis of its limitations.The thesis can be divided into five chapters. Introduction includes the researchbackground and research questions. Chapter2is the introduction of studies on translationethics and includes definition of ethics, return and research scope of translation ethics, andstudies on translation ethics at home and abroad; Chapter3mainly aims to introduce andanalyze Chesterman’s “Five Models”, on the following chapter, the author tries to raisesome suggestions in order to improve Chesterman’s “Five Models” on translation ethics,and the last chapter is the conclusion, including contributions of the study and advices forfurther researches.