郭蓉菊
(湖南机电职业技术学院，湖南 津市 415400)
[摘要] “信、达、雅”是19世纪严复提出的翻译标准，它对于翻译者来说一直被认为是具有实际意义的准则。显然，三者之中“信守（原文内容）”是最为重要的，而且是翻译工作者最起码应负的责任。然而，语言之间存在许多的不同之处——词汇学、语言学结构甚至文化传统之间的差异。因此，“绝对的忠信”是不可能的，本文重点论述翻译过程中如何尽可能达到“信守原文内容意旨”——不仅信守原文内容，而且保持原文的形式和风格，并以正式的、恰当的方式表达出来。
[关键词]：信守原文内容 不同点 翻译 形式和风格
Analysis of Faithfulness in Translation
Guo Rongju
(Hunan Mechanical & Electrical Polytechnic, Jinshi City 415400)
Abstract: Faithfulness, smoothness, elegance, a translation standard put forward by Yan Fu in the 19th century, has always been a practical rule to the translators. In this standard, obviously, ‘faithful (to the original)’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 ‘absolute 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.
Key words: faithful (to the original); disparity; translation; form and style
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1. The importance of the faithfulness in translation.
‘信、达、雅’，a translation standard was put forward by Yan Fu in the 19th century, has always been a practical rule the translators. In this standard, ‘信’ means ‘faithful (to the original)’. Since what a translator really does is to express 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. For example, ‘There are translations and translations.’ The Chinese meaning is ‘有各式各样的译本，有好也有坏’. 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 ‘译本’.Translation has connections with a lot of aspects, and a translator always has his own emphasis, so there are different kinds of translations. In a simple word, fidelity to the source-language text in content and intention, grammatical normality and lexical appropriateness can serve as cardinal principles of translation.
2. The difficulties concerning faithfulness in translation.
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 naïve 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 hundred years, although English has loaned a lot of words from French, the two peoples will at times meet difficulties in finding an equivalence to one in another language. The English have always said that in French there is not an equivalence to the word ‘home’ or ‘gentleman’, while the French believe that in English there is not an appropriate translation to the French expression’ Rassemblement du Peuple Francais’(the literal meaning is ‘法国人民大会党’).
Although English is the native language of both England and America, the same case will at times happen to these two peoples. ‘Orchestra chairs’ in an American writer’s novel was mistaken for “乐池座位”,in fact ,it means ‘stall’ (正厅前排座位)in English. while a British phrase ‘merchant bank’ was translated into ‘商业银行’,but it means ‘investment bank (投资信贷银行)’in American English. American always complain that the expression ‘to burn out one’s backlog’ (把老本都花光了)——a commendatory term in their language, turns out to be a derogatory one in British English, which means “因罢工、匮乏和种种困难而积压的工作’,they often say ‘serious backlog’ or ‘formidable backlog’. For hundred 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.
3. How to achieve real faithfulness?
Even the language belong to the same family can not reach the entire faithfulness, not to say the translations between two language families. The Chinese phrases such as ‘切磋’、‘疏通’、‘隔膜’、‘不通’are the words that can’ t find an equivalence in English.
Since ‘absolute 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:
3.1 What does ‘faithful to the original context’ mean?
‘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，诵悉一是，尊稿极佳，惟篇幅太长，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:
Translation1: 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’, for it has translated out such expressions as ‘诵悉’、‘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. The sentence ‘I received your letter yesterday’ itself has already contained the meaning of the grammatical structure ‘诵悉一是’.
To do well in this respect, we should pay enough attention to the follow three points.
3.1.1 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 ‘招贴即撕’,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 saying 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.
3.1.2 The false faithfulness resulted from obligatory categories.
Some translations seem to be faithful, while in fact they are not. The reason is that each language has its own obligatory categories, which differ from language to language. In English nouns have singular and plural form, verbs have 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’. But in China, we call somebody ‘堂兄’‘堂弟’‘表姐’‘表妹’.It makes 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. 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, and an adjective into an adjective etc.. It is because different language has different ways of expression. In Chinese, we say ‘真讨厌’(an adjective phrase),while in English a noun phrase ‘What a nuisance’ is more often heard than an adjective phrase ‘How annoying’. 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 circum stances, we should make a change to ‘its language structure. Let’s think about how to translate a very popular Chinese saying ‘好是好’in to English? Maybe someone will put6 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. To make a change to its Chinese linguistic structure is a good means. And still to this sentence, I think we can make a good us of intonation. The best and the most vivid translation should be ‘It’s good, but….
3.1.3 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 Pingyin ‘ta’ has three written forms as ‘他’、‘她’and ‘它’,they pronounced the same; While in English, they are totally different either in the written form or in the pronunciation. So the Chinese word ‘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 ‘虾’means both ‘prawn’ and ‘lobster’. Even ‘车’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 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 ‘acre’, ‘Fahrenheit’, ‘gallons’, ‘ounces’ ‘miles’, ‘peace’, 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 ‘这个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 weighs 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 ‘at sixes and sevens’ is ‘七零八落’or ‘七颠八倒’.And the idiomatic English saying of “半斤八两”is ‘much of muchness’ or ‘tweedledum and tweedledee’.
3.2 Pass the readers to the ‘feeling-tone’ of the original context.
‘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’ 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 ‘山重水复疑无路，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.
3.2.1 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——simile, metaphor, metonymy , personification, irony, alliteration, etc.. But in translation, the most popular figures of speech a translator would come across are metaphor and metonymy.
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 ‘life blood’ are used metaphorically. Sometimes these metaphors can be translated literally, For example, ‘Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested’. Here, it can be translated literally as ‘有些书只需要尝一尝，有的则需吞下去，少数的还需要咀嚼和消化’。In the sentence ‘The machine sitting at that desk was no longer a man; It was a busy New York broker…’, it can also be translated literally as ‘坐在那张桌子前的那台机器，不再是一般人，而是一个忙碌着的纽约经纪人’.So 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 can’t translate literally. For example, in Henry Fairlie’s sentence ‘Even with the most educated and the most literate, the King’s English slips and slides in Conversation’, here slips(滑跤)，slides (滑倒) refers to ‘makes mistakes’.
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 ‘纯粹是罗斯福的口吻’.Let’s 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 ‘这一点，一般人不理解，华尔街那些大老板们却是明白的’. And we Chinese must be familiar with these line ‘知否？知否？应是绿肥红瘦’.In the third line, ‘绿’refers to the leaf while ‘红’to the flower, so ‘肥’and ‘瘦’also has its context meaning. And the English version is ‘But don’t you know/ Oh, don’t you know/The red should languish and green must grow?’ However, only does a translator have a clear understanding of its original context meaning should he faithfully translate out its extended meaning. Please have a look at this line ‘君不见，玉环飞燕皆尘土。’We Chinese know that ‘ 玉环、飞燕’were the beauty of beauties, but they were apt to envy others. Here,‘玉环、飞燕’are the metonymy to all the beauties who are apt to envy . So we can translate this line as ‘Have you not seen, all jealous beauties turn to dust?’ But if we take their body figures into consideration (Yang Yuhuan was plump while Zhao Feiyan was slender), we can write a more faithful and beautiful line ‘ Have you not seen ,both plump and slender jealous beauties turn to dust?’
3.2.2 Sound effect.
In the respect of faithfulness, a very important but always been neglected factor id the sound effect. Sound effect does only include the onomatopoeia, the words in imitation of the sounds associated with the thing concerned (such as ‘gurgle’ and ‘cuckoo’) .What more important is, we should pay due attention to the elements as phonology and symmetry. Since there are various kinds of discrepancies in different languages, the translations will inevitably be longer or shorter than the original. Sometimes a translator has to reject or add something to retain its original style. Take the Chinese sentence ‘我的心扑通扑通地跳’ for example, the translation ‘My heart palpitates.’ has already achieved its Chinese meaning, but the sentence ‘My heart goes thumped thump.’ Is better in the style of sound effect. So the latter is a more faithful translation.
However, such an effect is more important in the idioms and proverbs. To the English proverb ‘As ye saw, so shall ye reap.’, the Chinese version‘种瓜得瓜，种豆得豆。’is a good choice. And the sentence ‘A fall into the pit, a gain in your wit.’ means‘吃一堑，长一智’.To the Chinese saying ‘养兵千日，用兵一时’，it may be all right to say ‘Armies are to be maintained for years but used on a single day.’ But it is better to say ‘Armies are to be maintained in the course of long years but to be used in the nick of time’. For the expression ‘in the course of long years’ is more symmetrical to the expression ‘in the nick of time’. Let’s have a look at the English saying ‘One boy is a boy, two boys half a boy, three boys no boys’. The literal meaning is very clear, but how to make a translation reach its original meaning at the same time not destroy its original sound effect? The Chinese saying‘一个和尚挑水吃，两个和尚抬水吃，三个和尚没水吃。’is a perfect choice in the respect of true faithfulness.
To the poems, more attention should be paid to the meter, rhyme and rhythm. So a translator at times should make some changes to maintain its balance, beauty and entity. Take these lines for example:
In a Wonderland they die,
Dreaming as they go by,
Dreaming as the summers die.
Please ponder the translation:
本来都是梦里游，
梦里开心梦里游，
梦里岁月梦里游。
In the original, the second and the third lines roughly possess the same meaning. In the translation, although the translator has added something to the second line and mingled its original order, these changes haven’t changed the original meaning at all. On the contrary, these changes descend the ‘feeling-tone’ from the original and the Chinese version does bring to the readers the spirit hidden in the original.
4. The qualifications a translator should possess in faithfulness.
As it related in the foregoing parts, differences are existing among different languages. Therefore, the translation often challenges the translator’s wits. And translation is recreation, recreation survives in novelty. In conclusion, as long as we have a solid language foundation, as long as we grasp a wide range of both Chinese and English vocabulary, as long as we have a broad knowledge of different cultures and traditions of different countries, we can convey the meaning of the original exactly to the point in a beautiful way, and we will bring the readers perfectly the same feeling as the original will give them.
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