With the advent of the era of "everyone can translate", how can translation give consideration to both original meaning and poetic meaning
2021-10-27
We are in an era of translation. Everyone can translate. With the help of photo translation, screen word delimitation translation, search engine translation and other tools, people who can't speak a foreign language can easily deal with scenes that need a foreign language; Translation is everywhere. Most of the mobile phones, computers and skin care products we use are equipped with instructions that have been translated into multiple languages, and most of the international news we browse are also compiled. Translation has become a part of modern life. However, what is the quality of translation that can be translated by everyone and everywhere? What kind of impact will Europeanized Chinese with a large number of English words and complex syntax have on our language and culture? People have turned a blind eye to the "translation cavity" Everyone can translate and translate everywhere, bringing instant translation and fast food translation. Prescription is life. In order to pursue efficiency, we often do not seek a deep understanding, but only a general idea. In foreign restaurants, taking pictures, translating and ordering meals, or taking words from the screen to understand the meaning of foreign language documents, translation tools do make our life and work more convenient. However, if the translation is open to the public, such as book translation, public sign translation, news translation, instruction translation, etc., we must strictly avoid such rough translation or mechanical translation. This kind of rough translation or mechanical translation is often not accurate enough, the wording is too Europeanized, and even mixed with many literal errors. Many translators translate "when" into "Dang" as soon as they see "when", and are used to connecting multiple pre modifiers with "de"; Seeing the passive voice of English, it is translated into the word "Bei" structure, so there are the problems of "Dangdang continuous", "continuous" and "being continuous". Yu Guangzhong called this Europeanized translation "malignant westernization of Chinese", and its evil lies in "reducing simplicity to complexity and replacing cleverness with clumsiness". If you read a translated work and only see pieces of long sentences with "Dangdang constant", "constant" and "being constant", the beauty of simplicity in Chinese will be out of the question and will also affect readers' reading. However, many times people are used to it and think that the translation is like this. It can be seen that people have collective unconscious tolerance for the translation with "translation cavity". This tolerance means that everyone has turned a blind eye to the "translation cavity". Europeanization of Chinese originated from the May 4th New Literature movement, which has experienced three stages: praise, reflection and reconciliation, and is always closely related to translation. Fu Sinian advocated "Europeanized Mandarin" as early as 1919. On the one hand, Hu Shi advocated the overall westernization of culture, on the other hand, he always reserved the Europeanization of modern Chinese. Lu Xun believed that "the method of Chinese writing or speaking is too imprecise", so he advocated a hybrid "Europeanized style". Zheng Zhenduo and Shen Yanbing also advocated Europeanization of style or grammar. Twenty years after the May 4th New Literature movement, people began to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of Europeanization. Linguist Guo Shaoyu admitted that the Europeanization of Chinese is helpful to new literature, and also pointed out that excessive Europeanization "will inevitably be tired of writing". In terms of translation practice, domestication translation began to prevail again. For example, translator Zhang Guruo translated "the Tess of the DVD" by "authentic Chinese" and translated the Wessex dialect in the English original into a local Shandong dialect. Fu Donghua, a translator, translated gone with the wind, which made the names of people and places Chinese. Over Europeanized literal translation is a false loyalty to the original text History is always strikingly similar. Since the 1980s, with the arrival of the fourth translation climax in China, the trend of Europeanization in translation has sprung up again and continues to this day. This has aroused the concern of many scholars that the Europeanized sentence patterns brought by "translation cavity" will seriously affect the purity of Chinese. The Europeanization of Chinese in translation is closely related to English as a universal language. Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. Compared with English, Chinese is less translated into foreign languages. According to the statistics of the national copyright administration, in 2019, China introduced 15684 Book copyrights, including 7643 books from Britain and the United States; In the same year, 13680 copyright books were exported, of which 1107 Chinese books were exported to Britain and the United States. In 2019, the number of British and American books introduced in China is about 7 times that of Chinese books exported to Britain and America. On the whole, the deficit of Book Export and import in China is narrowing, but the deficit between the translation of Chinese books and the translation of English books is very large. The input of foreign languages brings not only new ideas and technologies, but also foreign culture. With the spread of English around the world, many scholars worry that a large number of Europeanized vocabulary and syntax will impact the local language ecology, which may cause the local language to slowly lose its own characteristics and the possibility of being translated, so as to weaken the position of the local language in the global language ecology. People also worry that a large number of Europeanized languages will pollute the pure local languages and cause language colonization. These concerns make sense. UNESCO released the world map of endangered languages in 2010. There are about 6500 languages in the world, nearly half of which are endangered. In addition, some linguists estimate that about every other week, a language will disappear in the world. However, the vitality of human civilization lies in communication, which is inseparable from translation. As long as translation exists, the interaction between different languages is inevitable. As far as our country is concerned, it is inevitable that Chinese will be influenced by English and other foreign languages, but we don't have to worry too much. Language has its internal mechanism of purify and filter. It will extract its essence and its dross in communication with other languages. For example, some words translated from a foreign language have become part of Chinese, and we don't even realize that they come from a foreign language. Chinese personal pronouns have gender differences. It began in 1917. Under the influence of English, the singular personal pronouns of "he", "she" and "it" appeared. Later, under the influence of French, the corresponding plural forms of "they", "they" and "they" appeared. As for sentence patterns, foreign sentence patterns such as "one" and "not so much as" enrich the expression of Chinese and enhance the logic and strictness of Chinese. In short, the introduction of new words and expressions from foreign languages has greatly enhanced the inclusiveness of Chinese. As for people's concern about the excessive Europeanization of Chinese, in addition to the lack of translators' translation ability, it is mainly due to the imbalance of cultural exchange. Therefore, what we oppose is not Europeanization beneficial to the development of language and culture, but excessive Europeanization. The over Europeanized style uses a lot of "Bei" sentences, uses too many abstract nouns and conjunctions, and copies the long sentence structure of the original text, which is often lengthy, hard and even logical confusion. This so-called literal translation is a false loyalty to the original text, which is criticized by Mr. Qian Zhongshu. It can be listed as a "lie table". Choose the appropriate translation skills according to the specific context Language is the most important carrier of culture. Translation is essentially a dialogue between two languages, texts and cultures. The translator enters the horizon of the source text with his own historical horizon. In the dialogue across time and space and across culture, the two horizons can be integrated to produce new significance. Therefore, translation is not only a problem of language transformation, but also a cultural problem, which is closely related to the construction of local culture. In the context of economic globalization and cultural diversity, translators must take the construction and dissemination of local culture as their own responsibility, combine the specific context of local culture and foreign culture, and correctly use translation skills according to the target audience, text type and translation direction (translation in or translation out). First, before translation, the translator should make clear the basic problems such as which type the text belongs to and who will read the text. Lu Xun once proposed "hard translation" from the perspective of cultural strategy, and the translation has an obvious "translation cavity", but not all his translations are like this. Considering the differences of text function, text type and reader object, he adopted the translation strategy of "hard translation" for well-educated readers in translating literary theory, while free translation is the main method in translating children's literary works. Second, different translation methods should be adopted depending on whether the direction of translation is "foreign translation in China" or "Chinese translation in foreign". In view of the alienation strategy advocated by translation theorist wenuti to resist English cultural hegemony, Irish scholar Michael Cronin believes that in order to preserve the characteristics and differences of Irish, we should translate English texts in authentic Irish and Irish texts in impedance English with Irish characteristics. Similarly, when translating an English text into Chinese, the translator must reasonably determine the degree of "translation cavity" of the translation according to the specific situation. On the one hand, in order to better develop Chinese culture and reflect the inclusiveness of Chinese culture, the translation with a little "translation cavity" is used to present the new and different cultures of the other; On the other hand, in order to maintain the uniqueness of Chinese culture, we should avoid low-level negative mechanical "translation cavity", reduce the use of Europeanized sentence patterns according to the different translation functions, text types and readers, and correct the wrong values in the original text. In short, language and translation have never been transparent things without value. Translation with "translation cavity" undertakes specific cultural and political tasks in special periods in history. Under the background of globalization, translators must comprehensively consider various elements affecting translation and culture from the perspective of cultural strategy and adopt the most appropriate translation method, Promote the construction and dissemination of local culture in translation. (outlook new era)
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