A Contrastive Study On Different Ethical Norms And Their Influence On Translators' Strategies

Different social backgrounds and national cultures have great effects on people's ethical concepts. On the other hand, people's ethical values, most sensitively and directly, reflect the unique features of a certain nation. Owing to the influence of such factors as ideology, cultural background, and historical origin, there has been a huge difference between Chinese and western ethical norms. There exist, indeed, contrastive ethical differences between China and the West such as "politics-combined vs. religion-combined ethic", "family-oriented vs. individual-oriented ethic", "equal obligations vs. equal rights", "personal morality vs. public morality" and "respect-emphasized vs. fraternity-emphasized family ethic", etc. (黄建中,1998:83-90)In view of these ethical differences between Chinese and western cultures, different translators, in the process of translation, will be inevitably influenced by the ethical concepts of their own and adopt different translating strategies in their translation works. However, the contrastive studies done before on the Chinese and western ethical systems have been mostly from the viewpoint of philosophy. There are not many researches done from the angle of contrastive studies of English and Chinese and, at the same time, combined with translation to treat these ethical differences. Similarly, among the numerous studies done at home and abroad on the English versions of Hongloumeng, one of the greatest of Chinese literary works, few are conducted on the ethical differences between Chinese and western cultures and on the influence of these ethical differences on the translators' adoption of strategies.Therefore, this thesis attempts, from different angles, to analyze the differences in ethical concepts between the two cultures, and to explore the influence of those differences on translators' translating strategies. Based on the contrastive study on the following aspects such as family ethics, love ethics, marriage ethics, women ethics, sexual ethics, and so on, the author comes to the conclusion that there are indeed numerous differences between Chinese and western ethical systems, and that these ethical differences will play a decisive role in translators' translating activities, and even influence, to a large extent, the style of the translation works. Through the case study on the two English versions of Hongloumeng, the writer of this thesis points out that different translators, nurtured under different ethical systems, may adopt different strategies such as expounding, amplifying, substituting, omitting, and the like, to deal with the ethical matters existing in the source language text in the process of translation. In other words, the differences in ethical norms between China and the West impel the translators to make ethical choices of their own. And sometimes, translators will also conduct rewritings, either consciously or unconsciously, to the original, according to their own moral judgments. Besides, owing to the presence of cultural differences and differences in translators' understanding, misreading and the consequent mistranslation will arise almost inevitably in the process of translation. In short, translators should build up a strong perception toward different ethical systems and make every effort to avoid cultural misreading and to retain the culturally heterogeneous messages of the original so as to make their translations maximally close to the source language texts.This thesis consists of five chapters plus an introduction (Chapter 1) and a conclusion (Chapter 7). Chapter 2, starting from the definition of ethics, introduces several representative theories in contemporary researches on ethics and discusses the relationship between ethics and translation studies. Chapter 3 is a general analysis on the ethical differences between the Chinese and western cultures, pointing out the numerous differences between the Chinese and western ethical systems mainly derived from the divergence of group-orientation and individualism. Chapter 4 is a brief introduction to Hongloumeng and its translations as well as a survey of the contemporary scholars' researches on its English versions. As the main part of the thesis, Chapter 5, based on Chapter 2 and combined with a case study on the two English versions of Hongloumeng, offers a detailed contrastive analysis on the ethical differences between China and the West from such aspects as family, religion, love, marriage, values and sex, and meanwhile, explores how these differences in ethical concepts influence the translators' translating strategies. Chapter 6 touches upon misreading and related rewriting resulting from the differences in ethical conceptions.