| It becomes no more a question that traditional translation theories and linguistically-oriented approaches to translation are highly prescriptive, empirical, confusingly vague and hence biased. As their focal concept and first concern, "faithfulness" or "equivalence" has received occasional criticism from within scholarly circles.Snell-Hornby(2001:3) indicates that translation theories "must be both broad enough to have general validity and flexible enough to be adapted to the individual text" .Traditional translation theories centered around the notion of faithfulness or replication may find their typical applications in non-literary texts, since in such texts, what is said about the word is the most important. For instance, one would like the translation of a weather report or news bulletin to be true if and only if the original is true. But to translate literary works, things are different. Reiss's suggestion that there are basically three types of text, according to whether they place emphasis on content, form, or appeal, which ought to be treated differently and Nida's differentiation of all potential texts in the light of their respective functions which might be either expressive, informative or imperative, adding that the translator-reader will often be totally reliant on context to determine how to interpret a particular text are so telling confirmations of the above-mentioned fact that traditional translation theories are too rigid to be applied to translating literary works. Faithfulness as a theory of or an approach to translation is indeed an interesting criterion, but it leads to nowhere in practice. It has ever caused, is likely to continue to cause, but should no longer deserve to cause any heated debates within the field of translation studies.As to translation studies, What is now needed is, besides a well-justified assessment of traditional translation theories and linguistically-oriented approaches to translation which still cling to the concept of equivalence as is typically represented by Reiss, Newmark, Nida, Kade, Wilss, Koller, Catford and many others, and which hold that the text should be seen as a linear sequence of linguistic units, hence translation is just a transcoding process involving the substitution of a sequence of equivalent units, "to start a sound and goal-oriented dialogue in the sense of creative team work, a dialogue where, so to say, all the flowers may blossom" (Paul Betcke 1999:l),a dialogue where inter-disciplinary study of text in context should be carried out, and a dialogue which is so co-operative that it differs much from many academic gatherings where scholars merely present their own proceedings and in the best case pretend to be listening instead of attentively and positively listening to what their rivals really have to say. The most important step in the furthering of translation theories is to go beyond as soon as possible the purely linguistic comparison of different textual versions and linguistic systems towards a conscious understanding of how translation and translators will be interfered with by quite a few outside factors and considerations so that translations deviate from the original and how translations will operate and be accepted in the target culture.The selection and completion of this paper are influenced by the movement of transformation of paradigm that has been going on within scholarly circles since 1970's, that is, an orientation towards the cultural rather than linguistic transfer, and towards the function of the target text instead of the prescriptions of the source text.Chapter one briefly introduces the theoretical demerits of traditional translation theories both home and abroad. In doing so, the author aims at a support of the frequently heard warning that the prescriptive and empirical thing-in-itself study of translation theory is of little significance in theIVcurrent context when what is prevailing and dominant in theoretical circles of translation is the orientation towards cultural transfer.
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