A Research On Translation Strategy Of Russian-Chinese And Russian-English Translations From The Perspective Of A.Pym’s Translation Ethics Theory

At the beginning of the 1990s,the talk of translation studies was moving away from"fidelity" to political,cultural,and rights.Thus,further discussion on the return to ethics in translation studies takes on new significance.Anthony Pym is one of the most representative scholars in translation ethics.He sees the role of translators as intermediaries that work out of a neutral space between cultures,which Pym calls intercultural space,to facilitate cross-cultural cooperation.Pym combined this the concept with neo-classical economics,developing the theory of "translation as a transaction cost and risk management",which offered an interdisciplinary approach to translation studies and served as a guide to the practice of translation.This thesis adopts Pym’s translation ethics theory as a guiding principle and the"translation as a transaction cost" model as an evaluation standard to perform an analysis of translation strategies in three Russian-Chinese and three Russian-English translations of Chekhov’s The Lady with the Little Dog.The thesis analyzes how different translators manage the economic and ethical constraints in their translations,exploring the relationship between translation strategies and interculturality.Based on three languages,Russian,Chinese and English,this thesis finds that being in two different intercultural spaces,Russian-Chinese and Russian-English translators are not affected by differences in their nationalities,languages,and cultural backgrounds.These translators share a commonality in their choices of translation strategies.Overall,Tong Daoming,Qiu Guang,Wilkes and Pevear s translations showcase better interculturality.They trans fer the communicative risk,enhancing the credibility of translators,and encourage the communication between readers and the original text by adopting simplification,generalization and translator’s notes.Thus,their works present a greater awareness of risk management and translation costs.Ru Long and Garnett’s translations lack an awareness of risk management and interculturality due to their tendency to adopt simplification and literalist approach.Such strategies help reducing the translation cost,but increase reader’s evaluation cost,resulting in higher translation costs than the overall translation benefits.Through the analysis of translation strategies,this thesis finds that translation strategies can reflect the interculturality of translators and the awareness of translation as risk management.Yet,there is no absolute correlation between the translation cost of different translation strategies and the interculturality of translators,which means higher translation costs do not infer that translators have better intercultural awareness,and vice versa.