Study On Translatability

The issue of translatability has always been the hot topic in translation history. The paper, first of all, give a historical review about this issue and find out that there are essentially two points of view from which translatability has been traditionally approached: the universalist one and the monadist one. Supporters of the former approach claim that the existence of linguistic universals ensure translatability. Those who endorse the latter approach maintain that each linguistic community interprets reality in its own particular way and this jeopardises translatability. There is a third, more recent approach to translatability: that of the Deconstructionists, who question the notion of translation as transfer of meaning.The issue of translatability has always been a major concern of English-Chinese translation due to vast differences between two languages. Because English and Chinese belong to two different language families. No doubt, the differences between two languages are quite big on linguistic and cultural levels. So the paper puts the issue of translatability in the English- Chinese translation context. It mainly examines how linguistic and cultural differences influence the translation process in terms of translatability. To sum up, the consensus now seems to be that absolute untranslatability, whether linguistic or cultural, does not exist. The notion of untranslatability has been unpopular in the twentieth century mainly due to ideological reasons. Whatever approach to the analysis of the translatability of a text into another language/culture, it is important to realize that, even under the least favorable of conditions, the linguistic tool - the natural language, the language of man - is always potentially able to express elements belonging to another language/culture. Therefore, the important prerequisite for a text to be translatable is the translator's awareness: translators must know the differences existing between languages and cultures so that they can work out translation strategies able to cope with the various translatability problems. All in all, translation is possible. Untranslatability is relative while translatability is absolute. This is the dialectical law of translation.