A Comparative Study On The Two Chinese Versions Of On The Road From The Perspective Of Reiss’s Translation Criticism Theory

Katharina Reiss, a German scholar, is a theory translator who has a wealth of practicalexperience and teaching experience, she published a large number of monographs and articlesof translation theories and has a significant impact on the development of westen translationtheory. She published Translation Criticism–The Potentials and Limitations in1971, whichmarks the appearance of German Functional Translation Theory genre. In this book, Reissclassified the source text into four text types from the perspective of the translator, they are,content-focused text, form-focused text, appeal-focused text and audio-medial focused textand suggest that this classification be employed in translation criticism. Reiss also put textfunctions into her translation criticism, believes that the ideal translation should be equal interms of conceptual content, language form and communicative function with the original text,that is her “integral communicative performance”. Reiss’s text classification and translationmethod tries to take out an appropriate function effect，which is beyond the word and sentencelevel, so as to achieve the purpose of communication. Reiss tries to put forward a set ofobjective standard for translation criticism and construct a general frame, this frame is widelyapplicable and has a strong point in the evaluation of different translations.On The Road is Jack Kerouac’s famous book which was published in1957and isregarded as the Bible of the “Beat Generation”. The study of Jack Kerouac and his works iscontinuing since middle1950s at abroad. At present, in China, there are totally4Chineseversions among which Wen Chu’an and Wang Yongnian’s versions are more popular, thequality of the translated texts are varied.In order to conduct a more in-depth study of the translators’ choice of translationstrategies for the same literary work in the same target language, this thesis makes use of Katharina Reiss’ text function theory to do a comparison study of Wen Chu’an’s and WangYongnian’s translated version. The result shows that Wen Chu’an and Wang Yongnian havemade great efforts to reproduce the original text’s spirit and artistic value when they weretranslating this masterpiece. However, as they were affected by different ideology andsubjective factors, they show great differences on the choice and application of the translationstrategies, which makes the styles of their translated texts vary from each other. The translatedversion of Wen Chu’an’s is close to the original text in spirit and esthetic function, whileWang Yongnian follows the principle of faithfulness so as to reproduce the originalinformation faithfully and literally.