Faithfulness In The Context Of Cultural Turn

In the developing process of human beings, translation is a significant communicative activity with a long history. As a fundamental discipline of translation studies, faithfulness becomes a controversial issue since the appearance of translation practice.Translation has been studied as a source-language-oriented linguistic transfer by traditional translation theorists, who claim that a competent translator should be completely faithful to the source language text. This opinion has pushed translation and translators into a dilemma. The situation did not change until the 1970s. During the last thirty years of the 20^th century, translation studies have witnessed a profound researching revolution. Cultural studies in translation circle moves from margin to the center. This movement is termed as "cultural turn". Like a real revolution, the cultural turn has greatly expanded people's horizons and translation becomes a negotiation restricted by a large number of cultural and social factors. Moreover, more and more scholars tend to study the role of the translator from a sociological perspective. From the "ideal translator" in vacuum to the translator in the cultural context, people's understanding on the translator also begins to shift.However, following the cultural turn, faithfulness becomes more and more controversial. In view of many scholars, the original text is undetermined. The translator should be free to explain the original text, and faithfulness to the original has become meaningless. This view is immediately questioned by another group of scholars, who totally oppose the deconstruction theory in cultural turn. The topic of faithfulness becomes a hot potato in academic circle. In view of this, the author of this thesis makes a research on the notion of faithfulness based on an objective point of view.In Chapter 1, the author introduces faithfulness as the central topic of this thesis and explains three writing purposes:Firstly, to sort out faithfulness in historical view so as to get people's basic views on the notion of faithfulness;Secondly, to clarify people's misunderstanding and misunderstanding about faithfulness;Thirdly, to explain the nature of faithfulness from the deconstruction perspective in cultural turn;Fourthly, to make a judgment on faithfulness in the context of cultural turn.In Chapter 2, the thesis reviews Western and Chinese scholar's arguments on the notion of faithfulness before the cultural turn. Although traditional translation theorist holds different opinions on the approach to faithfulness, most of them think a good translator should be the loyal servant of the author, a postman conveying the author's messages. Traditional translation theorists hold that a good translator should be completely in accordance with the author of the original like a faithful servant with whole commitment. Under the wave of cultural turn, such a static and isolated recognition becomes a problematic issue.After the historical review on the question caused by faithfulness, Chapter 3 describes the background knowledge, the key guiding theory, schools and their academic perspective in cultural turn. Cultural turn is based on the suspecting idea of deconstructionism, which is on the basis of the elimination to "logos centre" in philosophy. This perspective helps people to deepen the understanding on the essence of translation.Chapter 4 describes the theoretical questioning of cultural turn to the concept of faithfulness from three aspects, which includes the subjectivity of the translator, the relevant independence of the translated version and the role that readers play in translation.Chapter 5 aims to eliminate people's misreading and misunderstanding. As the key theory of cultural turn, deconstructionism has not denied the importance of faithfulness. On the contrary, cultural school in cultural turn maintains the reasonability of faithfulness from the deep sense.In Chapter 6, in order to explain the nature of faithfulness, the author makes a clarification about some Chinese scholar's misunderstanding to faithfulness. From the perspective of cultural studies school, translation is negotiation between two friends and faithfulness is regarded as an ethical issue. To explain this inference, the thesis applies modern Topological theory to translation studies. The Topological structure of the translation contains variables and constants. The variables usually refer to the imaginary meaning. In the sense of topology, translation is a process of transformation that aims to preserve the constants of the source language text. A translation is faithful under the condition that the constants retain their constancy, even if the variables have been changed dramatically.The last Chapter concludes the whole study. In this part, the author puts forward that the faithfulness in cultural turn is a "negotiation" between translators and authors, a process between the SL cultures and the TL culture. Meanwhile, the cultural turn in translation studies did not deny the significance of faithfulness; faithfulness is still a crucial criterion for translators to follow. The author also puts forward the guiding implication of this concept to the subject of translation studies and translation practice. The clarification of faithfulness in this paper helps people to grasp the essence of translation, which will promote the subjective construction of translation studies and the progress of translation practice. Following people's further understanding on the essence of translation, the notion of faithfulness will be richened and developed continuously.