On Back Translation Of English Literary Works About Chinese Subjects

In translation between Chinese and English, there exists a special phenomenon. When English literary works about "Chinese stories" are translated back into Chinese again, it has something to do with cultural reconstruction, or a kind of back translation. The purpose of this paper is to provide researchers with an overview of issues regarding the cross-cultural study as well as the adapting or translating an instrument. In addition, the practical guidelines and the possible methods that can detect such problems are also included. Based on Wang Zheng-liang’s concepts about back translation, the author probes how the two translators deal with their translation in the process of back translation and makes a detailed comparative study of its two Chinese versions from the perspective of the concepts of back translation. Four major factors leading to two translators’inaccurate reconstruction in the TT are concluded as the translator’s inadequacies of relevant cultural knowledge, neglect of the context, willful deletion of original information.In light of relevance-theoretic account of back-translation, this paper also examines what the study of back translation can bring to translation study and contrastive study. It claims that both back translation and translation should be a means of communication and that the former should be a tool reference to restore the original intra-lingual communication with reference to the translation, in which some implications may be obtained for the contrastive study of two languages and assessments of translation. Therefore, in practice both back translators and translators have to accept temporal and spatial cultural constraints, and they themselves and their works should be closely examined in case any relevant study is to be done.