Chinese translations of 'David Copperfield': Accuracy and acculturation

Since 1907, there have appeared in mainland China five translations of David Copperfield. Each is a statement and an interpretation of the novel, reflecting the social and literary awareness of the translator.;Lin Shu first translated the novel with the help of his co-translators. His translation is characterized by its deletions and alterations. In his effort to make his work read more like a Chinese novel than a translation, he used vocabulary, images and allusions familiar to the Chinese audience. He even changed basic features of some of his characters to adapt to Chinese social conventions. The second translation was done by Xu Tianhong in 1943, whose promise to restore the "true face" of Dickens led him to attach great importance to textual fidelity. He produced a much more accurate version than Lin's. But oftentimes, Xu's almost word-for-word approach fell into literalism and failed to render the connotations of the language. In 1950, Dong Qiusi turned out the third version. He clarified many textual errors in Xu's version, and had some success in rendering idiolects, one of the prominent features of Dickens's novel. He observed even more strictly than Xu the lexical signs and syntactic order of the original often at the expense of fluency in Chinese. In the same year, Lin Handa's abridged translation was published. His drastic deletion changed the size and the substance of the novel. In spite of this, he contributed to the translation of wordplay and language variation. In 1980, Zhang Guruo produced the fifth version of the novel. He shared Lin Shu's style of translation but not Lin's major errors. He might have been inspired by Dong's phonetic resolution of idiolect translation and Lin Handa's experiments on puns and speech variations. As a whole, his version builds upon the previous ones and far surpasses them in accuracy and expressiveness.;In this paper, I have treated these five translations historically, culturally and linguistically. I have shown how each translator's purpose and method of translation affect the quality of his work, and how each responds to its predecessors. I have argued that accuracy and acculturation are not always antithetical, and that accuracy cannot be achieved without acculturation. Nevertheless, acculturation carries with it both blessing and potential disaster and should be used with restraint.