Faithfulness In Translation

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‘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

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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, Germa

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