Translators' Responsibilities

As seen from the history of translation studies both in China and abroad, it has gone through a development from the classical paradigm of literature and art to linguistic paradigm and then to cultural mode. In each phase, each translation school had realized the role of translators in the translation activity which centers on people's thinking and creation, especially under the influence of the postmodern thoughts, the issue of translators' responsibilities had been seriously considered again. Based on Wen Yiduo's ideas of translators' responsibilities, and combined with the modern western and Chinese translation theories, this thesis will propose some duties which translators should perform in the context of globalization.Traditional translation studies took linguistic analysis and texts comparison as its main task, considering translators' duty to be representing the maximum equivalent information of the original text, and ignoring the cultural elements in translation and translators' cultural responsibilities. However, since the 1970s, translation studies had gone to another extreme. Under the influence of cultural studies, translation studies had broken through the traditional aesthetic and linguistic mode and gradually grew into a reflection of culture, discussing translation in a grand cultural context to expand the field and vision of translation research. Whereas, these theories overemphasized the effect of politics, culture and ideology in translation, and they broadened unlimitedly translators' subjectivity, while translation nature—a transformation between two languages had been forgotten, thus going far away from the ontological study of translation.Mr. Wen Yiduo was an outstanding Chinese scholar, who was not only good at poetry writing, but also at poetry translation practice and theories. He was one of the earliest scholars in China who had realized the translators' responsibilities. In the 1920s, he published two famous articles to discuss poetry translation, pointing out that translators should be responsible for the original writer and themselves. Combining with the practice of Wen Yiduo's poetry translation and translation criticism, this thesis analyzes his ideas of the translators' responsibilities in poetry translation, and makes comments on its rationality and limitations.With the development and enrichment of translation studies, more and more new elements are added, for example, the commercialization of translation, the appearance of clients and patronages, and the communication of translation with other disciplines such as politics, ethics, etc. Therefore, this thesis develops Mr. Wen's ideas of translators' responsibilities into six aspects: to represent the source text, to fulfill the communicative function of the translation, to meet clients' demands, to obey the professional ethics of translation, to conform to the cultural and ideological requirements of target language, and to transmit foreign culture. It discusses these "six responsibilities" in detail, combining modern context and contemporary translation theories in China and abroad. At last, the author proposes translators to bring their subjectivities into full play and well perform their responsibilities based on the linguistic and cultural context.