On Cultural Mistranslation From The Perspective Of Translation Ethics

Cultural mistranslation, as a unique phenomenon in cross-cultural communication, is inevitable in translation. It reflects the collision, distortion and deformation between different cultures. The traditional translation studies holds"fidelity"or"equivalence"as the only or even supreme criterion. According to this criterion, cultural mistranslation becomes an important tool to attack the translator. Since the"cultural turn"in translation studies, the understanding on translation has changed greatly: translating activity is not only the transference of language, but also the communication of cultures. After the hot discussion based on cultural studies, some western scholars such as Anthony Pym, Antoine Berman and Andrew Chesterman, point out that Translation Studies has returned to question of ethics, which results in a lively discussion.On the basis of former studies, this thesis, drawing on Andrew Chesterman's models of translation ethics, aims to investigate and evaluate cultural mistranslation, then to explore its causes and develop a scientific and well-founded criticism on cultural mistranslation, which helps to enhance the quality of translation criticism. Therefore, the present research offers a new angle to study cultural mistranslation and the introduction of Andrew Chesterman's models of translation ethics theory into our traditional views on translation can enlarge our knowledge on the criterion of translation criticism.Translation is a kind of age-old cultural communication. As long as trans-cultural contacts between different nations and countries occur, problems in ethics inevitably arise. Andrew Chesterman distinguishes between what he sees as five current models: ethics of representation, ethics of service, ethics of communication, a norm-based ethics and the ethics of commitment. We can see that translators cannot lay equal stress on these five ethics. In this thesis, concrete examples of cultural mistranslation are selected from four works: three Chinese versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Scarlet Letter; two English versions of Hongloumeng and Teahouse. These works are translated by different translators in different times. By doing case study, we conclude that cultural mistranslation shows the translator's obedience to different models of translation ethics in different times. Therefore, the change of cultural mistranslation indicates the change of the translator's ethical conception and the improvement of his self-consciousness.Finally, the present study comes to a general conclusion: the traditional one-sided criticism does not fully reveal the value of a translation; the five models of translation ethics are dynamic and open-ended due to the different value ideology of the translator and critic in different stages and through the ethical approach, cultural mistranslation can be evaluated from a dynamic and stereoscopic perspective; the content of'fidelity'is broadened and translation criticism becomes more acceptable. It states that cultural mistranslation plays an important role in cultural exchange. However, positive results are achieved by cultural mistranslation at the cost of other aspects. Thus, cultural mistranslation, whether intentional or unintentional, should not be regarded as the main trend of translation activities. At the same time, to admit the inevitability and rationality of cultural mistranslation is not to abandon'fidelity'. When facing many contradictions in translation, if it's impossible to take account of all ethics, translators should make their great efforts to harmonize the contradictions and obey the ethics of commitment to strive for excellent translation.