Faithfulness In Translation

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 ‘acre’, ‘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 ‘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 weights 28.35 grams. To solve these problems, the most popular

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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 ‘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

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.

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 tra

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