Faithfulness In Translation

Faithfulness In Translation

Thesis Submitted in Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts

June 1999

Abstract

‘信、達(dá)、雅’, a translation standard put forward by Yan Fu in the

19th century, has always been a practical rule to the translators.

In this standard, ‘信’ means ‘faithful (to the original)’. Obviously,

‘faithful’ is the most important among the three, and it is the first

responsibility to a translator. However, there are disparities between

one language and another – disparities in the lexicology, in the linguistic

structure or even in the tradition and culture. So ‘a(chǎn)bsolute faithfulness’

is impossible. And this article emphasizes on how to achieve the real

faithfulness in a possible sense – a faithful translation in good

formality with not only the original context, but also the original form

and style. To achieve such an effect we should do well in two aspects.

On the one hand, faithful to the original doesn’t mean to give an

equivalent correspondence to each word literally. While doing this we

should take these factors into consideration – idiomatic translation;

the false faithfulness resulted from obligatory categories; different

classifications in different cultures. On the other hand, faithful to

the original also requires the translator to bring to the readers the

feeling-tone of the original. In doing this we should pay enough

attention to the figures of speech as well as the sound effect. As

long as we observe these rules in translation, we will be able to bring

to the readers perfectly the same feeling as the original will give them.

Content

This thesis centers about the faithfulness in translation.

It comprises four major parts.

Part one introduces the importance of the faithfulness in translation.

Part two puts forward the difficulties concerning faithfulness

when we translate one language into another.

Part three explains at length how to achieve real faithfulness. This

part consists of two aspects.

On the one hand, faithful to the original doesn’t mean to give an

equivalent correspondence to each word literally.

On the other hand, faithful to the original also requires the

translator to bring to the readers the feeling-tone of the original.

Part four summaries the qualifications we should possess in the

respect of faithfulness.

‘There are translations and translations.’ The Chinese meaning is ‘有各式各樣的

譯本，有好也有壞’. It is a sentence that can’t be translated literally. Because

in English the word ‘translation’ has both its singular and plural forms, while

in Chinese no same case with ‘譯本’. Translation has connections with a lot of

aspects, and a translator always has his own emphasis, so there are different kinds

of translations. ‘信、達(dá)、雅’, a translation standard which was put forward by Yan Fu

in the 19th century, has always been a practical rule to the translators. In this

standard, ‘信’ means ‘faithful (to the original)’. Since what a translator really

does is expressing other people’s idea in a different language, so the content of

his translation must strictly comply with that of the original. And it is very clear

that ‘faithful’ is the most important among the three, and it is the first

responsibility to a translator.

However, there are disparities between one language and another – disparities in

the lexicology, in the linguistic structure or even in the tradition and culture. And

to maintain that there is always an equivalent correspondence in one language that can

match the one in another is a naive thought. Take English and French for instance.

Although there is only one strait between them, although they have mutual influences

onto each other for about one thousand years, although English has loaned a lot of words

form French, the two peoples will at times meet difficulties in finding a equivalence

to the one in another language. The English have always said that in French there

isn’t an equivalence to the word ‘home’ or ‘gentleman’, while the French believe

that in English there isn’t an appropriate translation to the French expression

‘Rassemblement du Peuple Francais’ (the literal meaning is ‘法國(guó)人民大會(huì)黨’).

Although English is the native language of both England and America, the same case

will at times happen to these two peoples. The American can’t find the British match

to their word ‘sissy’. And they always complain that the word ‘compromise’, a

derogatory term in their language, turns out to be a commendatory one in British

English. For hundreds of years, the American has invented a lot of new words, but

many of which don’t work in England. In 1922, the American writer Sinclair Lewis

wrote a novel named ‘Babbitt’, a book full of idiomatic local American language.

After ‘Babbitt’ arrived in England, the British added over 120 terms of annotations

for fear that their people can’t well understand the American English. But later on

the British found that there were a lot of mistakes in their annotations. So it is

not an exaggeration to say that even the British can not fully understand the American

English, and even the British English can not faithfully defined the American English

well enough.

Even the languages belong to the same family can not reach the entire faithfulness, not

to say the translations between two language families. Chinese, different from English,

is the language belonging to the Sino-Tipiden Family. ‘切磋’、‘疏通’ 、‘隔膜’ 、

‘砥礪’ 、‘不通’ are the words that can’t find an equivalence in English. Since

‘a(chǎn)bsolute faithfulness’ is impossible, we needn’t take pains to achieve it. And

what a translator should do is to try every means to achieve the real faithfulness in

a possible sense. That means a translation should be in good formality with the

original context, form and style. And the real faithfulness includes two aspects.

On the one hand, ‘faithful to the original’ doesn’t mean that a translator should

give an equivalence to each word literally. What a translator should be faithful to

is not the meaning of the odd words but that of the grammatical structure which is

made up by these words. Take a short letter for example. ‘昨奉大函，誦悉一是。尊稿極佳，

惟篇幅甚長(zhǎng)，本志地位有限，故不克刊登，良用歉然�！� It is the letter written in ancient

Chinese and please compare these 2 translations.

Translation 1: I received your letter yesterday, and on reading noted all its contents.

Your article is very good. But it is very long, while this magazine has only limited

space, so that it cannot be published. Thus I have much cause to be sorry.

Translation 2: I received your letter yesterday. Your article is very good, but I am

sorry that owing to pressure of space, I find it too long to be published.

Obviously, on the surface, the first translation is more ‘faithful’ than the second

one, for it has translated out such expressions as ‘誦悉’、‘一是’、‘良用’, etc..

But it seems rather rigid and too formalistic. In the second translation, I think it

is wise not to give an correspondence to each word as ‘誦’ ‘悉’ ‘一’ ‘是’. For

since ‘I received your letter yesterday’, and ‘I’ didn’t just receive (奉) without

reading（誦）or read（誦）without noting its content（悉）, the sentence ‘I received

your letter yesterday’ itself has already contained the meaning of the grammatical

structure‘誦悉一是’.

To do well in this respect, we should pay enough attention to the following three points.

First, idiomatic translation.

Each language has its own idiomatic way of collocations, and in most cases it is

impossible to find an expression in one language that is entirely equivalent to the

one in another. For example, in Chinese we say ‘此路不通’, but you can’t take it

for granted that the English version is ‘This road doesn’t go through.’. Although

you have translated out all its meaning, the English version will not, at least not

remind the English of a signpost saying ‘No Thoroughfare.’ Or ‘Not a Thorough street.’

In Chinese there is a saying going like ‘招貼即撕’, and in English there is also a

saying ‘Post No Bills’. You must have heard of ‘rain cats and dogs’ in English.

Someone says that this expression is originated from a North European mythology, which

tells us that the heavy rain is caused by the mischief of cats and dogs. And someone

says it is a metaphor to the fighting between cats and dogs. However, there are no

such sayings in French, German, Russian or even Chinese. In Chinese, we say ‘大雨滂沱’.

For such a saying, although a literal translation can present a correct meaning, it is

not idiomatic and it does not comply with the original in function, so it is by no

means faithful.

Second, the false faithfulness resulted from obligatory categories.

Some translations seem to be quite faithful, while in fact they are not. The reason is

that each language has its own obligatory categories, which differ

language. For instance, in English nouns have both their singular and plural form and

verbs have both their past and present tense, which it is not the same with nouns and

verbs in Chinese. Also in English, ‘cousin’ means ‘child of one’s uncle or aunt’,

so it does not make it clear that whether this ‘cousin’ is male or female, whether

he/she is elder or younger than the speaker, whether he/she has the consanguinity with

the speaker’s father or mother. However, in China, when we call somebody ‘堂兄’

‘堂妹’ ‘表姐’ ‘表弟’, we point out all these characteristics. Thus problems occur

in translation. But as long as such obligatory categories are not just as important, we

can make a brief translation. Take ‘早上好，表妹’ for example, a brief translation

‘Good morning, cousin.’ is enough. Otherwise we should say ‘Good morning, my

female-cousin-on-mother’s-or-paternal-aunt’s-side-younger-than-myself’. And in

Chinese as well as in Russian, ‘嫁’ and ‘娶’ is not the same thing, while in

English ‘marry’ means both. So the time we need to translate ‘嫁’ or ‘娶’ into

English, ‘marry’ is enough.

Besides, we should avoid a tendency – to translate a verb into a verb, an adjective

into an adjective, a noun phrase into a noun phrase, etc.. It is because different

language has different ways of expression. In Chinese, we say ‘真討厭’ (an adjective

phrase), while in English a noun phrase ‘What a nuisance’ is more often heard than

an adjective phrase ‘How annoying’. French people say ‘Quelle merveille!’ (a noun

phrase), while the English say ‘How marvelous!’ rather than ‘What marvel!’. A

Chinese adjective phrase ‘真好玩’ should be translated into English as a noun phrase

‘What fun’, for the adjective phrase ‘How funny’ means ‘ridiculous’. Since the

root of ‘可人’ is ‘人’(person), it may seem all right to translate it into English

as ‘personable’, while the appropriate version should be ‘lovable’.

Sometimes, not only should a translator avoid making a verb-to-verb or a noun-to-noun

translation, he should even avoid using the same hierarchical structure. Under such

circumstances, we should make a change to its language structure. Let’s think about how

to translate a very popular Chinese saying ‘好是好’ into English? Maybe someone will put

it like this ‘(As for being) good, (it) is good.’. Unfortunately, this English version is

too limited to the Chinese linguistic structure, so it can’t translate out the hidden

meaning successfully. Then how to translate out its original meaning? To make a change to

its Chinese linguistic structure is a good means. We can say ‘It’s good, but …’ And

still to this sentence, I think we can make a good use of intonation. So the best and the

most vivid translation should be ‘It’s good, but …’.

Third, different classifications in different cultures.

Different culture has different means to classify things, either in the nature of things

or in the fields of numerical expressions, weights and measure, etc.. In Chinese,

although the Pingying ‘ta’ has three written forms as ‘他’ 、‘她’and‘它’, they

pronounced the same; while in English, ‘he’、‘she’ and ‘it’ are totally different

either in the written form or in the pronunciation. So the Pingying ‘ta’ has the

different nature with either ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it’. Also, the Chinese character ‘桌’

means both the ‘table’ and ‘desk’ in English, and ‘蝦’ means both ‘prawn’ and

‘lobster’. Even ‘車’does not only mean ‘vehicle’. So when translating, we should

choose a most appropriate match to these words. For instance, ‘青’ has a wide range

of meanings in Chinese. And the English version for ‘青衣’ should be ‘black dress’

while ‘青天’ be ‘blue sky’. However, sometimes it is impossible for us to do so.

In England, ‘teenager’ is directed to the young men at the age of between eleven

and nineteen; while in Chinese, there is not a corresponding word representing such an

age group. In US, they use ‘feet’ and ‘inches’ to measure human’s height, and they

use ‘pounds’ to measure human’s weight; while in China, the measurements we have are

the metric system as ‘meters’, ‘centimeters’, and ‘kilograms’. In British, they

have their weights and measures as ‘a(chǎn)cre’, ‘fathenheit’, ‘pints’, ‘gallons’,

‘drams’, ‘stone’, ‘grains’, ‘ounces’, ‘miles’, ‘bushels’, ‘pence’, etc.

However, we don’t employ these systems of unit in China and we don’t have the

ready-made words at hand. And all these arise problems while we do translations.

Suppose we read from a book that ‘這個(gè)人身高五英尺六英寸’(‘This man is five feet six

inches tall.’), we Chinese will can’t help wondering what exact the height he is. And

for the first time we learn that ‘它有16盎斯重’(‘It weights 16 ounces.), in fact we

don’t know it really weights 28.35 grams. To solve these problems, the most popular

means the translators adopt is to add a footnote saying ‘5 feet 6 inches is equal to

1.68 meters.’, or ’16 ounces is equal to 28.5 grams.’. In most cases this adoption

will achieve the original faithfulness, but under certain circumstances such a footnote

will not work and we should employ a popular and idiomatic way of expression. For

example, the popular Chinese saying of ‘a(chǎn)t sixes and sevens’ is ‘七零八落’ or

‘七顛八倒’. And the idiomatic English saying of ‘半斤八兩’ is ‘tweedledum and

tweedledee’ or ‘much of a muchness’.

On the other hand, ‘faithful to the original’ means that a translator should not

only translate out all the original content, but also pass to the readers the

‘feeling-tone’ of the original lines. ‘feeling-tone’ which is originated from

the word ‘Gefuhlston’ in linguistics, simply means the meaning between the words.

Language is used not just to express one’s idea, what more important is, to convey

one’s feelings, or even to move the readers, to persuade the readers into thinking

what the author is thinking about. Poets are good at exert the influence of language,

to give readers a kind of hint, a kind of impulse. When we read the two lines ‘山重水

復(fù)疑無路，柳暗花明又一村’, we are influenced by the magic of language, and we can’t

help imagining as if, we ourselves were just on the scene.

To successfully convey the ‘feeling-tone’ of the original, a translator should pay

enough attention to the following two aspects.

First, figures of speech.

Words used in their original meanings are used literally, while words used in

extended meanings for the purpose of making comparisons or calling up pictures in the

reader’s mind are used figuratively. Only does a translator convey the extended meaning

to the readers can we say that he is faithful to the original. There are various kinds

of figures of speech – metonymy, metaphor, simile, personification, irony, alliteration,

etc.. But in translation, the most popular figures of speech a translator would come

across are metonymy and metaphor.

Metaphor is the use of a word which originally denotes one thing to refer to another

with a similar quality, and it is used to make the article more vivid. In the sentences

like ‘he is the soul of the team’, ‘irrigation is the life blood of agriculture’,

‘soul’ and ‘lifeblood’ are used metaphorically. Sometimes these metaphors can be

translated literally. For example: ‘He ran his administration as a one-man show, and

loved to exercise authority.’ Here, ‘one-man show’ can be translated literally as

‘獨(dú)腳戲’. In the sentence ‘Arthur Krock reported that “he was the boss, the dynamo,

the work”.’, ‘the boss, the dynamo, the works’ can also be translated literally as

‘是老板，是發(fā)電機(jī)，是鐘表的發(fā)條’. Sometimes, a metaphor in English corresponds to

another metaphor in Chinese. Take this sentence for example ‘Once she wondered whether

her outspokenness might be a liability to Franklin.’, here the metaphor ‘liability’

corresponds to the metaphor ‘包袱’ in Chinese. And we can see from the above that in

most cases we can find a rather faithful and vivid expression in Chinese to match the

one in English. But in certain cases, we have to speak clearly what the original

metaphor really means. For instance, ‘…discrediting the BEF became the official

line… Some of the dirt was bound to stick.’. For the latter part of the sentence, we

have no choice but to make it clear that ‘受過污蔑就洗也洗不掉’.

To the metonymy in English, we can add some Chinese to achieve its original sense,

but we can seldom reach its original brevity. For example, ‘No phrase was borrowed;

it was pure Roosevelt.’. The appropriate translation for the metonymy ‘pure Roosevelt’

is ‘純粹是羅斯福的口吻’. The sentence ‘She … set what was conceded to be the finest

table in White House history.’ Can be translated as ‘她的食譜據(jù)說是白宮歷史上最講究的�！�

. Let’s take a look at this sentence: ‘If Main Street didn’t understand this, Wall

Street did.’ In this sentence, ‘Main Street’ and ‘Wall Street’ also have their

context meaning. So the rather faithful translation should be ‘這一點(diǎn)，一般人不理解，

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