Embodiment Of Chesterman's Models Of Translation Ethics In Translation Practice

As a cross-cultural communicative activity, translation definitely establishes itself on the basis of certain values, morality and ethics. Therefore, the essential attribute of translation determines that it needs ethics as a guiding theory. With the development of the 1990's cultural turn as well as the return of translation ethics, more and more scholars pay attention to translation ethic, which has become a hot topic in translation studies. In 1981, Antoine Berman, a French translator and philosopher, first proposed the concept of “Translation Ethics”. From then on, scholars from home and abroad, such as Lawrence Venuti, Anthony Pym, Andrew Chesterman and Lv Jun, to name just a few, have put forward their own translation ethics respectively, among which the Finnish scholar Andrew Chesterman is the most representative. He first made a systematic summary and division of current translation ethic, classifying translation ethics into four models: ethics of representation, ethics of service, ethics of communication and norm-based ethics. And on this basis, Chesterman proposed an ethics of commitment, which forms a system with the other four models.The Kite Runner was the first book written by Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini, which won widespread attention and favorable comments all over the world after its publication. Currently, there are two Chinese versions of The Kite Runner in China: one is a traditional Chinese version translated by Li Jingyi from Taiwan, the other is a simplified Chinese version translated by Li Jihong in mainland China. Both of these two versions enjoy immense popularity and have been republished over 20 times respectively. Adopting Chesterman's five models of translation ethics as theoretical framework, the author intends to do a comparative study between the two Chinese versions of The Kite Runner, aiming to find out how the above models of translation ethics are embodied in the translation practice and how the translators make a choice when they are faced with ethical conflicts, so as to come to a better evaluation of the translated texts and at the same time reflect guiding function of translation ethics models in translation practice.The research results show that both of the two translators generally conform to the ethics of representation. When facing with ethical conflicts, they adopt different translation strategies and conform to translation ethics due to the influences of specific social culture, ideology and values, so their translated versions are different in style. This paper is devoted to open a broader view for the study of The Kite Runner, and at the same time to provide practice support for translation ethics.