Analyses Of The English Version Of Weicheng In Light Of Berman’s Analytic Framework

As a kind of cross-language and cross-cultural communication,translation is not only the transmission of language and culture,but also a kind of interpersonal communication and social ethical activity.The study of translation ethics began in the 1980 s.Antoine Berman,a French translator and translation theorist,was the first one to put forward the concept of “translation ethics”.He advocated abandoning ethnocentrism in translation,and deplored the translation strategy of deformation,adaptation and so on to naturalize the target text.Berman put forward 12 deforming tendencies which often occur in translation activities and explained them in great detail.The detailed analysis can help translators to avoid these tendencies in translation activity.As one of the most outstanding contemporary literary works in China,Weicheng has been translated into many languages,and enjoys high reputation in the literary world.Many scholars have done researches on its translation from different perspectives among which translation ethics is rarely studied.This paper aims to make a tentative study of the English version Fortress Besieged translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K Mao from the perspective of translation ethics and takes Berman’s 12 deforming tendencies as the framework.By listing some examples the paper demonstrates how these deforming tendencies are embodied or avoided in the translation.The research discovers that most of the deforming tendencies put forward by Berman are not found in Fortress Besieged,and the translation of Weicheng retains the foreignness of the original work.However,three tendencies are embodied in the translation and two tendencies are found to be both avoided and embodied in the target text.To appreciate the English version Fortress Besieged as a whole,the author finds that the translators have noticed and respected the “foreignness” in the source language and culture in the great majority of cases.And by taking foreignization as the dominant translation method and domestication as the second,they successfully restore the “foreignness” into the target text.In the translating of novels,especially works like Weicheng which has full flavor of literary and rich styles of language,the translator’s objective and the translation ethics s\he should obey have great influences on the quality of the translation work and the development of translation,as well as the spread of culture.Berman’s concern about translation ethics and his explanations for these deforming tendencies deserve our careful thought.