A Study Of Dong Qiusi’s Translation Criticism Thought

Translation criticism is extremely necessary for improving translation quality, and plays an important role in either translation theory or translation practice. In translation activities, on the one hand, translation criticism plays a coordinative role in guiding both translation theory and translation practice; and on the other hand, it corrects and promotes the practice while it enriches, perfects and even modifies the theory. For a long time, translation criticism has not been taken seriously in China. Especially in recent years, there are a large number of poor translations in translation community, and there even appear the phenomena of "plagiarism" and "copy translation" in the market. In the face of prevailing retranslations, it is inevitable to pass fish eyes for pearls, thus affecting the translation quality. It is hard for readers to make a choice after reading multiple translations of one work, either from the social and economic benefits or from the readers’ interest. In this case, only rational translation criticism can be relied on as a reference.Dong Qiusi is a famous modern translator in China, and he once made lots of outstanding achievements in both translation practice and translation theory. Early in the forties and fifties of the last century, he published a series of articles on translation criticism and called for translation criticism vigorously, proposing the standards, methods and criticism of translation criticism, which had failed to get enough attention from the academic field for a long period. Up to the present, no specific research on Dong’s translation criticism achievements has been done, which is disproportionate to his historical status and outstanding contribution to Chinese translation theory. And even the published articles about Dong Qiusi referred to few of his translation criticism achievements in the past. His articles on translation criticism are still of great value for the present world and can play a corrective and guiding role in changing all sorts of undesirable habits in the translation industry.This paper is divided into six chapters. The first chapter gives a brief introduction of Dong Qiusi’s life and translation career and describes the main contents of this paper. The second chapter is about some main concepts of translation criticism (TC). Chapter three is the main body of this paper, detailing Dong Qiusi’s TC thought. Chapter four makes a further analysis of the causes of Dong’s TC thought. Chapter five is the assessment of Dong’s TC thought, which includes contribution and limitation. The final chapter first concludes this paper, and then puts a special emphasis on the value and significance of this study, pointing out its guiding significance to the translation activities in our times.In view of Dong Qiusi’s translation criticism thought, this paper aims to help translation industry walking out of the above embarrassing situations, thus promoting the healthy and orderly advancement of China’s translation cause.