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’ 、
‘砥砺’ 、‘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.
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，诵悉一是。尊稿极佳，
惟篇幅甚长，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.
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 ‘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 as ‘诵’ ‘悉’ ‘一’ ‘是’. For
since ‘I received your letter yesterday’, and ‘I’ didn’t just receive (奉) without
reading（诵）or read（诵）without noting its content（悉）, 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 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 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 o
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