The Constraining Factors Of Ethical Norms On Translational Selections

There is a natural connection between translation and ethics. Since Antoine Berman put forward the translation ethics in 1984, more and more scholars have been attracted to this field. Anthony Pym, when editing the special issue of The Translator: The Return to Ethics suggested that the translation studies returned to questions of ethics. Therefore, in this thesis, we are going to use ethical norms to analyze translation selections. Both ethical theories and translation theories are used to investigate the constraining factors of ethical norms on translation selections at both above-text level and text level. The study on constraints of ethics on translation selections are conducted in four aspects. On the one hand, through the comparison of language selections, we can infer the different cultural stances and different translation strategies translators take, thus analyzing the underlying ethics they believe in. On the other, the feature of ethical norms and improper practices like plagiarism are also taken into consideration when analyzing the constraining factors. All the examples used to embody the constraints are from the English novel Lolita and its four different translations. By randomly selecting 1/3 of the text and thoroughly comparing them, the thesis draws the following conclusions: Firstly, the constraints of ethics exist in literary translation. Secondly, at the above-text level, we can find ethical constraints on cultural stances and economic interests. Thirdly, at the text level, the constraints reflect itself in translation strategies and language selections. Fourthly, the constraining factors of ethical norms on translation can be explained from two perspectives, i.e. the constraining nature of ethical norms and the cross-cultural function of translation.