Intentional Mistranslation From The Perspective Of Translation Ethics

In the context of translation studies from language research to culture research, people come to realize the necessity of "translation ethics return". In 1981, the French contemporary literary translator and translation theorist Antoine Berman proposed the concept "Translation Ethics" for the first time. Since then, more and more scholars at home and abroad have thought and researched the translation ethics deeply. Research emphasis of "translation ethics" is to study the orientation in the process of the translator in the translation, i.e., how does the translator translate. Among them, the Finnish scholar Andrew Chesterman proposes five ethic models of translation to explain ethics problems, which makes us have operability and effectiveness for the study on translation theory and practice.Based on Andrew Chesterman’s five translation ethics models for the theoretical framework, this thesis aims to study the motivations of the novel’s intentional mistranslation at the ethical level, taking The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai written by Eileen Chang and revised by Eva Hung as a case analysis. It is a good translation work, containing many forms of intentional mistranslation such as omission, amplification and transformation. This kind of translation phenomenon cannot be explained by the traditional translation theory. However, we can explore a more objective and reasonable interpretation for intentional mistranslation from the perspective of translation ethics. The results show that in essence, the translation ethics study is a problem of "faithfulness". Different translation ethics model has different value orientation. When the translator adopts the intentional mistranslation strategy, she gives a lot of attention to faithfulness, readers, communication ethics and profession ethics. The translator intentionally violates the representation ethics model, but she still follows the several other ethics models. From this point, we can see that the translation version not only is faithful to the original, but also has respect for the readers, text communication and professional ethics.Through analyzing this case and intentional mistranslation in the translation, this study finally put forward theoretically that translation ethics has powerful interpretation for intentional mistranslation in the novel of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai. Intentional mistranslation is a translation strategy, but the bottom line of faithfulness should be adhered to. Although Andrew Chesterman’s five translation ethics models are flawed, but the ethical models have a strong explanatory power to some translation phenomenon such as intentional mistranslation.