Dialectical Analyses Of Translatability

Whether language is translatable has always been a question of great academic concern. The way people answer it appreciably influences their evaluation of translation practice and their confidence in interlingual communication. Therefore, in a current world of frequent international exchanges and plentiful translation activities, the study of this issue proves all the more significant.The discussion of translatability has traditionally taken the form of a debate between proponents of translatability and those of untranslatability. The former group holds that generally speaking, language is translatable; translation, as a special type of social activity, is both possible and feasible. While the latter believes that strictly speaking, accurate interlingual translation is impossible; translators' job is simply a rough and unconvincing repetition of the original, which is expedient and not so desirable. During the long history of their intensive debate, both parties have experienced ebb and flow of people's preference. However, it is exactly the constant practice of challenging and defending on both sides that makes the truth ever-clearer.As a supporter of translatability, the authoress makes a series of dialectical analyses of translatability with special reference to the interlingual translation between Chinese and English. She sums up and comments on some representative arguments that were put forward previously, and further explores the theoretical and practical significance of the theory of translatability. Some creative efforts are made to get the author's ideas across:Firstly, both translatability and untranslatability are discussed in a broad sense and in a narrow sense respectively. By this distinction, the author clarifies some confusion of concepts that easily occurred in previous argumentation, thereby exposing the faulty logic in the theory of untranslatability.Secondly, some descriptive analyses of the limits of translatability are conducted on three linguistic levels respectively, which lend credence to the conclusion that what a translator should strive for is neither the formal correspondence on the grammatical level, nor the semantic conformity on the semantic level but the functional equivalence on the pragmatics level.Thirdly, information theory is introduced in the discussion of the ways to reduce the limits of translatability in that the limits of translatability can be effectively reduced by building into the translation necessary redundancy.The argumentation lay-out of this paper is as follows:In Chapter 1, the authoress gives a comparative account of the notions and theoretical bases of both translatability and untranslatability, thereby establishing the former as a true proposition and revealing the dialectic relationship between the two.In Chapter 2, the concept of the limits of translatability is put forward. An exploration of this issue is conducted in both linguistic and cultural perspectives, which is followed up with some descriptive analyses on three linguistic levels.Chapter 3 is devoted to the discussion of the ways to reduce the limits of translatability in which both guiding principles and specific techniques are offered.