西方翻译理论

一．The North American Translation Workshop(早期北美翻译学派)

Development:

①The North American Translation Workshop began to study the human’s brain function in the translation .

②It also put forward the nature and the definition of the translation

③It purposed many questions about epistemology which made a difference in the translation study and practice.

④It also doubt the standard of translation evaluation.

⑤The scholars in NATW subverted many traditional translation school and expressive form.

⑥It believed that translation is a kind of literary criticism.

While opening up new perspectives, the general approach as practiced in the North American Translation Workshop might be characterized by a theoretical naive and subjective methodologies that tend to reinforce whatever theoretical values individual translators hold.

1.I. A. Richards

Richards is a critic, linguist, poet, founder of New Criticism. He is often labeled as the father of the New Criticism, largely because of the influence of his first two books of critical theory, The Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism. Richards’s initial premises remain intact: he still believed that the field consists of texts containing a primary body of experience that readers could discern; with the proper training, a consensus could be reached regarding what that experience might be.

Richards’s aims were threefold: (1) to introduce a new kind of documentation into contemporary American culture; (2) to provide a new technique for individuals to discover for themselves what they think about poetry; (3) to discover new educational methods.

2. Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound’s theory of translation focused upon the precise rendering of details, of individual words and of single or even fragmented images;

Pound’s theoretical writing fall into two periods: an early imagist phase that, while departing from traditional forms of logic, still occasionally contained abstract concepts and impressions; and a second late imagist or vorticist phase that was based on words in action and luminous details;

Pound's emphasis was less on the "meaning" of the translated text or even on the meaning of specific words. Instead, he emphasized the rhythm, diction, and movement of words;

Pound supposes that we can have a creative translation besides literal translation and free translation.

3.Frederic Will

Meaning is redefined by Will as thrust or energy. Meaning is redefined by Will not as something behind the words or text, not as an essence in a traditional metaphysical sense, but as different, as thrust of energy, something which is at the same time indeterminate and groundless and universal and originary. Translation is possible both because dynamic universals constantly and continually thrust and because language is impenetrable. In translation Will seems to find a possible / impossible paradox of language which not only defines the translation process, but defines how we come to know ourselves through language.

wrence Venuti

An influential scholar among those who have broadened translation studies within the social-cultural framework is Lawrence Venuti. He put forward two translation strategies: Demesticating translation and Foreignising translation.

Lawrence Venuti’s contribution to translation studies are multiple: He criticizes the humanistic underpinning of much literary translation in the United States and shows how it reinforces prevailing domestic beliefs and ideologies;

He Provides a new set of terms and methods for analyzing translations;

He offers a set of alternative strategies he would like translators to try.

二．The Science of Translation (翻译科学派)

Development:

North American translation workshop might be characterized by a theoretical naive and subjective;

The problem is not just a contemporary phenomenon in North America, but one that has troubled translation theory historically;

People practiced translation, but they were never quite sure what they were practicing. Until early sixties, linguists has been characterized by largely descriptive research in which individual grammars were detailed. Generative transformational grammar along with its legitimacy within the field of linguistics, lent credence and influence to Nida’s science of translation.

1.Noam Chomsky

The phrase structure rules generate the deep structure of a sentence, which contained all the syntactic and semantic information that determine its meaning;

Chomsky’s empirical evidence of language structure is not based upon living language but on sentences found only in an ideal state;

He does not claim that the deep structure are universal.

The form of a particular language does not necessarily equal the form of another.

2.Nida

He proposed formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence;

He tries to lay the ground work for a larger audience;

Nida simplifies Chomsky’s transformation-generative grammar and adopt only the