The Causes And Positive Roles Of "Unfaithful" Translations

The notion of "faithfulness" often leads to different understandings. The majority holds the opinion that it should refer to the relationship between source text (ST) and target text (TT). But there are also some people believe that it can be regarded as a relationship between TT and target readers, and translators under such understanding can change the content, form, and/or style of ST in TT according to the factors as education levels and demand of target readers. This kind of translation is traditionally regarded as unfaithful translations though the translators may try to defend their action.In fact, unfaithful translations can be divided into two groups: the first group is resulted out of the difference of languages and cultures, or poor qualification of translators. As for the second, the translators deliberately make certain "necessary" changes to reach their goal. As most translators of this kind don't think the changes would damage the value of the source texts, we use the term " 'unfaithful' translations" to describe the source texts and the translation activities. This is the focus of the paper.Of course this paper does not aim to tell readers that a purpose-oriented unfaithful translation (marked as "unfaithful" translation) would be better than a faithful one. Rather, this paper tries to analyze the cause of "unfaithful" translations on the basis of facts, and to reveal that "unfaithful" translations are not useless.At the beginning, this paper sets the scale of study: for the two groups of unfaithful translations, the paper focuses on the first one that made on purpose. According to the means translators employed to make change, there can be three types of them: addition, reduction, and conversion. "Addition" and "reduction" are bound to the content of source texts;while "conversion" can take place in content, form and (or)style, more specifically, it serves to weaken, strengthen and (or) reverse these elements. A lot of examples are borrowed from history to support the idea.There are two causes of "unfaithful" translations. The first one is the translators' purpose. If that purpose is to respect the source text or the author, they are more likely to be faithful translations. Otherwise, "unfaithful" translations would take shape. Different purposes lead to different versions.The second cause comes from target culture. When there are elements in a source text that are not in accordance with the rule, beliefs, or norms in the target culture, the translation will meet strong resistance. Three factors play key role here: ideology and poetics in the target culture and patronage that decide the publication and circulation of the translation. In the case that the translator's purpose can only be reached after his work has entered the target culture, resistance of the three factors would force the translator to make compromise, i.e. to change the translation in order to win more readers.The positive roles "unfaithful" translations have played lie in four aspects. First, when the resistance from target culture is too strong, they can be more easily accepted to reach the new readers. Second, once these works come into the target culture, readers will soon have a touch of the alien elements they contain, hence a further and more comprehensive intercultural communication. Then, many "unfaithful" translations have provided the target culture with nourishment for its development. At last, they have offered a new perspective for today's translation studies.