An Analysis Of Faithfulness As A Concept In The Interpretive Theory

As an important principle of translation, faithfulness has been a controversial topic over a long period of time. However, since the commencement of translation, theorists at home and abroad have never ceased their exploration and research on it, which have stirred up many heated debates on a number of the main issues in translation, such as literal vs. free translation, spiritual similarity vs. form similarity, translatability vs. untranslatability, etc. These debates have greatly attributed to the enrichment of people's perception about this concept.The interpretive theory was proposed by the well-known French interpreter and translation theorist Danica Seleskovitch and her students on the basis of a large amount of translation practice. It emphasizes that the task of a translator is to convey sense instead of mechanically switching linguistic codes. Sense is the target of faithfulness in translation. Language is less important than it because linguistic codes are merely some symbols without any communicative meaning before they are associated with the cognitive knowledge of translators. There are three levels of translation, of which textual translation is accurate because it takes into account the element of context to grasp the sense. Translation is a kind of communicative act that consists of three procedures — comprehension, deverbalization and re-expression. Based on this perspective, theorists of the interpretive theory further propose three criteria for evaluating faithfulness — the author's intention, the specific manners of expression of the target language and the target readers. In judging faithfulness, we also have to consider three aspects — the subjectivity, the historicity and the functionality.