Criticism Of The Specification Of "Good" In Yang Bi's Chinese Version Of Vanity Fair

This thesis explores the issue of the translation of"good"in Mingli Chang (《名利场》), the Chinese version of Vanity Fair with a view to discussing the applicability of the translation technique of"specification", from the perspectives of Eugene A. Nida's theory of Functional Equivalence, Peter Newmark's Communicative and Semantic Translation Theory, and Yan Fu's Three-character Principle—"faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance", as well as the principle of"Categorization"in cognitive psychology.According to Eugene A. Nida's theory of Functional Equivalence, no translation is ever completely equivalent. Only through the degree of the correspondence between the responses the target language readers and the source language readers have towards their respective versions can the equivalence of the two versions be judged. The most ideal result would be that the readers of a translated text are able to understand and appreciate it in the same manner as the original readers did. However, their responses will never be identical if a high degree of language-culture non-correspondence between the source language and the target language exists. Therefore, the minimal result would be that the readers of a translated text are able to comprehend it to the point that they can conceive of how the original readers of the text must have understood and appreciated it. Peter Newmark differentiates semantic translation from communicative translation, saying that semantic translation focuses primarily on the semantic content of the source text while communicative translation lays emphasis upon the comprehension and response of the receptors. The Three-character Principle, namely faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance, proposed by Yan Fu, is widely discussed in the field of translation studies and has generally been accepted as the criterion of translation by the Chinese scholars. In recent years, psychology, with its rapid and thriving development, begins to shed new light on translation studies in many ways. From the perspective of categorization in cognitive process, translation is to match correctly the categorization of one language with that of another language. All of these theories have successfully gained wide-spreading recognition in the translation field. Although there may exist some divergences between them, if some common grounds could be found, they would turn out to be very strong and powerful standpoints to illustrate the strengths or weaknesses in the translation of Vanity Fair.Vanity Fair is considered to be the masterpiece of William Makepeace Thackeray, an outstanding critical writer in the 19th century England, and it is still regarded as a great work nowadays. Its Chinese version by Yang Bi enjoys a high status in translation studies in China, with its spectacular and amazing language and the vivid recreation of the effect of William Makepeace Thackeray's writing style. There is never a shortage of praise of her excellent translation. Nevertheless, the writer of this thesis intends to raise her own suspicions of the translation of"good"in Yang Bi's version on the basis of the aforementioned common grounds. By this thesis, the writer hopes to shed some light on the discussion concerning the applicability of the translation technique of"specification", so as to avoid unnecessary loss of the author's intended meaning and damage to the intended effect on the readers.