| Frederick Tsai (1918-2004), formerly called Cai Zhuotang, whose ancestors lived in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, is the famous proser and expert in translation in Hong Kong. He has been engaged in translation for over 40 years and has translated 20 books,60 poems and many short stories. Besides his translation practice, Tsai also involves in other correlated fields, such as translation teaching, translation studies and translation criticism. Furthermore, his translation view emphasizes the pursuit for pure Chinese and rejects the prevailing westernized Chinese, which has certain warning effect on the serious translationese in modern translation. Whereas, deeply subjected to Chinese traditional literary theories, Tsai’s translation view just involves in many translation skills but lacks theoretical support, thus becoming an object of public denunciation. Nevertheless, Tsai’s thought on translation criticism is rooted in Chinese traditional culture, and will contribute a lot to guiding translation practice after its systematization and theorization. This is of great value for the theoretical construction of modern Chinese translation criticism.The study selects Tsai’s comment on excerpts of five famous classic translations by means of his impressionist criticism as the research object. Then, through the analyses of these comments, features of his thought on translation criticism could be summarized and their underlying theoretical basis and principles will also be explored. The study propose two research questions:1. What is Tsai’s tendency and principles reflected in his comments of the Classic translated literary works?2. What is the theoretical basis of Tsai’s translation criticism?All his comments on five translated works can be classified into two kinds: comments on the language and comments on non-linguistic content. Based on Tsai’s own standard for translation criticism and German translation scholar Wolfram Wilss’s theoretical framework for studying translation criticism, the comments on language can be sub-classified into four kinds, appropriate, correct, inappropriate and incorrect, which constitutes a cline from the most appropriate to the least appropriate. And then according to the object of comments, these comments can also be classified into word translation, sentence translation, translation strategy and undetermined category. Through the classification and comparison, Tsai’s translation criticism shows two trends as follows:1. Tsai’s comments on the excerpts from the five translated works mainly concentrate on the words and sentence and make the translation strategy and translator’s accomplishment and other translation problems subsidiary.2. Tsai tends to commend the translation and rarely puts forward any negative criticism, which is mainly due to the fact that all these versions are translated by famous and competent professional translators. However, he does proposes many different opinions on Fu Donghua’s translation of Gone with the Wind.According to the results of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the principles of Tsai’s translation criticism can be concluded after systematic summary.Finally, the study explores the causes for the formation of Tsai’s translation criticism, summarizes the theoretical basis underlying his translation criticism, and meanwhile attempts to propose the theoretical framework of Tsai’s translation criticism for the purpose of providing some references for future literary translation criticism. |
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