A Look Into The Standard Of "Faithfulness, Expressiveness, Elegance" From A Hermeneutic Perspective

Hermeneutics is a time-honored discipline, which probes into the understanding and interpretation of meaning. The hermeneutic study of translation is a comparatively new topic in the translation field, bringing the hermeneutic theories into translation studies. According to hermeneutics, translation could be considered as a process of interpretation. While this process of interpretation, consisting of the source author, the source text, the interpreter, the target readers, is filled with subjectivity, which in turn, causes the plurality of interpretation. The combination of the two, the hermeneutic theory and translation studies, makes an explanation of many hotly-discussed questions in the translation field, such as differences in different translated versions of the same source language text, the necessity and importance of re-translation, etc. It also helps us to reevaluate the status of the source text, which was regarded to the only authority in the meaning-determination. The hermeneutic study of translation makes a reevaluation of the translator, who used to be considered to be unimportant and totally objective in the translation process. So the hermeneutic study provides a new perspective for translation studies and instills renewed energy into it. On the other hand, the standard in translation has always be one of the key problems in translation studies. The "Faithfulness, Expressiveness, Elegance" standard proposed by Yan Fu and supplemented and developed by the later generations of translators and theorists during more than one hundred years after its proposal, does not fade over from our sight. On the contrary, it arouses long-lasting interest and debating in the translation field and plays a decisive role in the history of translation studies in China. This author tries to demonstrate the relationship of dialectical unification among the three characters, that is, faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance, aiming to prove that the standard of "faithfulness" is the core of the standard. "Faithfulness" is believed to be the summarization of the crucial problems in translation and the basic requirement for the translator during translation activity. The other two standards, "Expressiveness" and "Elegance", serve for the goal of "Faithfulness". The author intends to introduce the hermeneutic theories, especially Gadamer's principles into the study of this three-character standard and demonstrate the relationship of unification between the plurality of interpretation and the standard of "Faithfulness". The author develops her discussion in multi-fold dimensions, connecting the principles in hermeneutics and several aspects of the standard of "Faithfulness" together. The standard of "Faithfulness", the core of the three-character standard, finds its theoretical support in hermeneutics studies. So the three-character standard fits in well with the plurality of interpretation perfectly. In this way, the author gets the conclusion that the hermeneutic translation study is a new and constructive perspective in translation studies.