A Tentative Probe Into Faithfulness In Translation

Faithfulness is an important question of the principle of translation. All theorists maintain that translation should be faithful to the original, and many translators have tempted to find the best approach to fidelity in their practice. However, no translator thinks that his translation is unfaithfulness to the original (at least standing on his position). Actually, some translakrs achieve a better faithfulness in their translations, and others don't. The reasons are both subjective and objective. Strictly speaking, the author holds that in this paper true translation should be faithful to the content, language and style of the original at the same time. But the author doesn't want to deal with the way to achieve faithfulness, and the author can't give a more faithful one, just the reason resulting in unfaithfulness. For faithfulness to be achieved, the author has put his hand to unfaithfulness. Through the command of some theories in relation to faithfulness, the reasons leading to unfaithfulness have been discussed to some extent. They are the reasons of linguistics, cultural background and thoughts, but mainly the first two. Meanwhile, many examples have been analyzed by using either linguistics or cultural background, and the both two. Among these examples, there-are single terms, sentences, short paragraphs and complete poems. The author has written this paper in the hope that it will do some good to the translators on the other point. Although the author's conclusion is - that faithfulness is just relative, picking holes is not his purpose. Here, the author does not want to comment carelessly on whether a translation is good or not, nor providing a better one. All the author has done is just a superficial knowledge of translation. Colleagues of circles of translation are earnestly requested to make corrections.