2017届福建省光泽第一中学高中英语教师论文：《从直译和意译看中国旅游景点名称的英译》_高考复习指南

2017届福建省光泽第一中学高中英语教师论文：《从直译和意译看中国旅游景点名称的英译》

　　3. Tourism and C-E Translation

　　Nowadays, translation is an inseparable part in the ever-growing Chinese tourist industry as a means of promoting further development of it.

　　3.1 General Translation Standard

　　Since the translation of tourist attractions’ names belongs to translation category, it is natural that it should follow general translation standard.

　　In the field of translation in China, people are often subject to the translation theory of “faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance” presented by Yan Fu, which can be summarized as honest and smooth. Honest here means being faithful to the original text’s content and style that consists of national, writing and linguistic styles, just like Lu Xun’s opinion: translation must maintain the form of the original work. So-called smooth refers to being clear and coherent, in other words, the main requirement of translation is to make it easy for the readers to comprehend. Honest and smooth are complementary to each other. Readers are not able to get the idea if the translation is not smooth while the translation will be just a mistranslation if it is out of the original’s content and style.

　　In Western countries, the “three laws of translation” were formulated by Alexander Fraser Tytler, an English theoretician. In his article Essay on the Principles of Translation(邱愚如， 2000), he puts forward three laws of translation: (1) the translation should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original work, (2) the style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of the original, (3) the translation should have the ease of the original composition. What he focuses on is still faithfulness. As far as faithfulness is concerned, there are three levels of faithfulness in terms of content, form and style. The perfect translation is to reach the three levels of faithfulness at the same time. But in most cases, it is difficult even impossible to do so. And sometimes we have to sacrifice the faithfulness in form or style to ensure the faithfulness of content. But by faithfulness, we don't mean to translate word for word to reach absolute faithfulness. In fact, the mechanical use of faithfulness, on the contrast, will lead to clumsy translation. On some occasions, we should make some adjustments in order to realize the genuine faithfulness.