| Faithfulness or fidelity has been the yardstick of translation practice for thousands of years. However, the debate on its definition and scope has never ceased. In fact, fidelity and betrayal is a pair of concepts borrowed from ethics and should be studied from this perspective. Ethics is a philosophy concerned with what is morally good and bad. In translation activity, there are many factors for translators to harmonize, which need the guide and regulation from the ethics of translation. In this thesis, the author explores fidelity, a very important measurement in translation criteria, from the modes of translation ethics and seeks for a new understanding of fidelity in the new century.Under the ethics of translation, fidelity is an obligation of translators. But fidelity is not just the full representation of source text. The different modes of ethics stand for different kinds of fidelity. These ethics are closely interrelated, but sometimes be in conflict. Thus, translators need decide what kind of ethics is the most urgent to be fulfilled. And, they should always obey the ethics of commitment to strive for excellent translation. In fact, during translators' effort to harmonize the contradictions, translation studies are moving forward.Chesterman's five modes of translation ethics will be used as theoretical framework to examine translation standards and translators' fidelity; by doing case study on three different versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin (translated by Lin Shu, Huang Jizhong, Wang Jiaxiang respectively), the research is seeking for the answer how translators' ethics affect their translation and exploring the developing trend of translation ethics.This thesis has six chapters. Chapter one is an introduction of the whole thesis, including the research background, research scope, research methodology, and research significance. In Chapter two, the author reviewed translation standards on fidelity in both China and the western world, mainly from the debate on wen and zhi, and the categories of equivalence. Chapter three exposes the internal connection between translation and ethics, and introduces the present researches on this field. Chapter four analyzes translator's fidelity under the modes of translation ethics. The concepts of translation ethics and translator's ethics will be distinguished. The fifth chapter applies the viewpoints in former chapters into a case study of three different versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and further proves the author's idea with texts' support. At last, the thesis is ended up with Chapter six, the conclusion. |
