Literary Translation Criteria And Strategies

Translation criteria can be expected to be not only the norm to conform to in the translation activities, but also the yardstick to evaluate the translation products. Translation strategies and style are multiplicative due to the different functions or intentions of literary translation and different expectations of the readers. The theories of translation criteria and strategies in China and western world have evolved in separate ways. Yet the core of each is to some extent common, and every theory evidences the development of the whole theoretical system of translation.Translation theory comes from translation practice and in turn serves guidance for translation practice. The development of translation theory provides more and more useful and effective guidance to literary translation activities. It is, as Peter Newmark holds, the business of translation theory to suggest some criteria and priorities for translators' analysis of texts. In the history of translation theory, various sets of criteria have been laid down by many well-known scholars. The trinity principle of "xin, da, ya" (faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance) in China and the doctrine of "equivalence" in the western world are two sets of most representative and profound literary translation criteria. Recently, some scholars have posed another theory, namely, the multiplicity of system of translation criteria, which seems to have more and more influence in the field of translation theory because it is more concrete and practical in the complicated translation activities. In translation practice, different concrete criteria different translators go after would lead to different translation strategies they take. When we talk about translation strategies, three pairs of concepts must be involved, namely, literal translation and free translation, semantic translation and communicative translation, foreignization and domestication, because they all make some contribution to the development of translation theory and practice. These translation theories are concerned in Chapter One and ChapterTwo as the theoretical basis for the comparative study of the three Chinese versions of David Copperfield in the following two chapters.Wilss insists that different text types require in translation not only different transferring methods, but also different translation equivalence criteria. Narration, description, dialogue and emotional conveyance are four types of writing which literary works, especially fiction, involve. Based on the statement and discussion on literary translation criteria and strategies in the two previous chapters, this thesis focuses on a comparative study of the three Chinese Versions of David Copperfield, respectively by Dong Qiusi, Zhang Guruo and Li Peng-en, in terms of narration, description, dialogue and emotional conveyance roughly from the angles of content, form, style and culture in Chapter Three and Chapter Four. After a careful tentative analysis, the author of this thesis concludes that Dong's version is economic in words, and faithful to the form of the original, but too much word-for-word or sentence-for-sentence translation, especially heavy foreignization in linguistic translation, leads to misunderstanding and un-smoothness in Chinese; Zhang's version, though a bit wordy, does better in reproducing the subtle shadow of meaning and literary style of the original and appealing to the readers' aesthetic and cultural sensitivity by genuine target text, which results from free translation in linguistics and foreignization in cultural transmission; Li's version is published about two decades later than the other two, and is written with much improvement as well as the combination of the advantages of both Dong's and Zhang's, hence stylistically well-formed and fits modern readers though there are still some faults in it.