A Study Of Tianyan Lun In The Light Of Skopos Theory

The publication of Tianyan Lun is a great event in the modern history of China and has tremendous social effect. As a matter of fact, this book has such profound influence that even till now, it is still a hot topic in various academic circles.Although it is generally acknowledged that Yan Fu regarded"faithfulness"as the most important translation standard, it is also a fact that Tianyan Lun is not a very faithful translation to the original text. Though Yan Fu confessed in his Introductory Remarks on the Translation that Tianyan Lun is not a literal translation but just a paraphrastic text, criticism to it has never stopped. One conspicuous demonstration is that, according to the traditional understanding of Tianyan Lun, it offers a brief introduction to Darwin's theory of evolution, especially its social doctrines, to claim that the state and the nation will certainly be eliminated if no changes would be made to the obsolete feudal system thus to call the Chinese people to follow the law of natural selection to save the nation and then to make the state become wealthy and powerful. However, the original text― Huxley's Evolution and Ethics is to show Huxley's opinion on ethics, that is, man has an obligation to exert his conscious dynamic to replace"self-assertion"with"self-restraint"and thus to against the social Darwinist efforts which employ the theory of evolution into ethics. However, Yan Fu argued in his Introductory Remarks on the Translation that the sense of the translation is not against that of the original text. Moreover, as Shen Suru and Wang Hongzhi argued, the essence of Yan Fu's"faithfulness"is just to ensure that the sense of a translation will not be against that of the original text. In...