On The English Translation Of Lu Xun’s Novels From The Perspective Of Chesterman’s Translation Ethics

Lu Xun is a famous Chinese realistic writer, whose novels are filled with profoundthoughts and strong realistic color and are therefore widely read by Chinese readers.Many translators have introduced Lu Xun’s novels into foreign countries, which greatlypromotes the transmission of his works and the spread of Chinese culture. At the sametime, scholars from home and abroad make deep study and research of the Englishtranslation of Lu Xun’s novels from different aspects like equivalence, aesthetics ofreception and eco-translatology.Ethics refer to the moral norms in interpersonal relations. As an important way ofcross-cultural communication, translation activity requires the restrictions of moral normsand translation ethics provide common translation norms for translation activities.Translation ethics was a new perspective in translation studies since the “cultural turn”.Western scholars like Antoine Berman, Anthony Pym and Lawrence Venuti proposed thestudy of ethics in translation studies. In his Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas inTranslation Theory, Finnish scholar Andrew Chesterman specially discussed problems oftranslation ethics and raised fives models of translation ethics namely ethics ofrepresentation, ethics of service, ethics of communication, norm-based ethics and ethicsof commitment, combining ethics and translation studies together and providing a newperspective for translation studies.This paper tries to probe into the English translation of Lu Xun’s novels fromChesterman’s five models of translation ethics, taking the English versions of the coupleYang and Dai, William A. Lyell and Wang Jizhen as examples. This research attempts toanalyze how Chesterman’s five models of Translation Ethics are manifested in theEnglish translation of Lu Xun’s novels and put forward the advantages and disadvantagesin the translation of novels, which not only provides a new perspective for the study ofthe translation of Lu Xun’s novels but gives practical support for the development oftranslation ethics.