A Comparative Study Of Two English Vresions Of Fu Sheng Liu Ji From The Perspective Of Models Of Translation Ethics

Fu Sheng Liu Ji (FSLJ) was written by Shen Fu, a famous writer inthe Qing Dynasty. Though words in the article are simple, the language isbeautiful, full of vitality and humanistic feelings. Therefore, it has beentranslated into different versions by scholars at home and abroad, namely,three English versions, versions of German, French, Danish, Swedish,Japanese and Malaysian. Among them, Lin Yutang’s Six Chapters of aFloating Life and Shirley M. Black’s Chapters from a Floating Life---TheAutobiography of a Chinese Artist are greatly concerned. The pastresearches are mainly focused on the translation of words, sentences andrhetorical devices from the perspective of Skopos theory, culturaltranslation theory and translation strategy, etc. However, translation ethics,especially models of translation ethics, has never been used to analyze thethree English versions. Moreover, the methods used previously were toomonotonous, so it is necessary to compare Lin’s version with Black’sversion from a new perspective, namely, models of translation ethics. Thepaper aims to provide a new perspective for readers to appreciate andevaluate the two versions, and to test whether the two versions havecompletely reproduced the original text and whether there are somedefects in the two versions, which might lay a good foundation for afurther study.Put forward by Andrew Chesterman, models of translation ethics have been widely used in the study of literary translation and achieved fruitfulresults. Therefore, it is feasible and operational to analyze FSLJ byadopting this theory. By means of comparative analysis, the paper ismeant to solve the following three questions：(1) under which models dothe two versions represent similarities?(2) under which models do thetwo versions show differences?(3) what are the defects of the twoversions under models of translation ethics, and how to improve them?To solve these questions, the author adopts methods of literaturereference, sampling analysis, qualitative analysis and exemplification tostudy100of the related papers selected randomly from CNKI. The resultsshow:(1) the two versions are similar in rendering lexical words andfigures of speech under ethics of communication;(2) the two versions aredifferent at lexical, syntactical and discourse level under ethics ofrepresentation, moreover the two English versions under ethics of serviceand norm-based ethics also show differences;(3) Lin’s version did notcompletely represent the aesthetic values of the original text, and Black’sversion has lots of addition, omission, changes and mistranslations.Finally, the paper reaches the conclusion that Chesterman’s fourmodels of translation ethics can be used to analyze English versions ofFSLJ, which provides new vitality for the further study.