Translation Style And Translators’ Character

Translation is a cross-disciplinary as well as a cross-linguistic, cross-cultural andcross-social communicative activity, and there has been research on translation andtranslators, but few have been done on the relationship between translation style andtranslators’ character.In literary writing, we have the saying of “works resembling their authors”.Different writers have different writing styles, as can be figured out according to theirdiction or style, such as Shakespeare abroad and Cao Xueqin in China. Here comesthe question: Could translation be the same or similar? Can we figure out thetranslators just according to their translation style? Or could there be any relationshipbetween translation style and translators’ character and personalities?With these question marks suspended, this paper mainly digs into theinterrelationship between translation style and translators’ characters, in an effort tomake some new discoveries on translation, especially literary translation. With theanalysis approach of comparison and contrast, the paper studies on translation styleand translators’ character from both macro and micro points of view. There are threemain parts: the first part deals with translation style; the second part talks abouttranslators’ character, and the third part is the detailed research on their relationship.Through the study of the paper, the author found that there exist indispensablerelations between translation style and translators’ character, about which manymasters of the field have also had relevant statements. The innovative point about thispaper is that the author makes some forefront attempts to integrate some fragments ofwords or theoretical statements into a new systematic proposition, forming a newcross-disciplinary field for translation study, which can do good not only fortranslation study, but also useful for improving translation quality and for choosingthe right translators for certain styles. Of course, this paper is only a preliminaryattempt, calling for further research and complement in future.