Hist Trans EN 15

History of Translations

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Abstract

Under different historical background, the modern and contemporary translations in western countries show their different characteristics and traits which cen be concluded from several perspectives.

Keywords

Western translation; translation history; modern; contemperary

Introduction

In this paper, western translation history in modern and contemporary ages will be introduced. Here the modern age refers to the nearly half century before the Second World War. The contemporary age refers to the half century after the Second World War. That is to say, the modern and contemporary translation in this paper refers to the translation in the 20th century. Under different historical background, the modern and contemporary translations show their different characteristics and traits which will be concluded and discussed in detail in the following.

The General Situation of Translation in the Modern Age

Into the 20th century, the capitalism in the developed countries developed into imperialism. On the one hand, the imperialist countries intensified their foreign expansion to oppress and exploit the weak countries and colonial people, while on the other hand, they were engaged in a fierce battle among themselves for international markets and spheres of influence. Thus, in less than half a century, two world wars broke out. Under this historical background, translation in western countries will inevitably be seriously disturbed and destroyed. However, in some specific fields and countries (such as the Soviet Union), the translation of this period also has its own traits, which can be summarized from the following four aspects.

Simplicity, smoothness and accuracy became the translation criterion.

In the translation of classics, translators no longer emphasized the elegant style of the original work, but took the simplicity, smoothness and accuracy as the criterion to measure the translation. Translators not only in France, but also in Britain, Germany, Italy, Russia and other countries began to break the tradition of poetry translation, generally advocating translating the original poem into prose, not into verse; Even when translating the works of the great poets of the past, they did not employ strict rhythm. The popular practice in translation was to translate the original poem into prose using plain language so that the translation can be understood by the reader without annotation. For example, E. Y. Rieu’s translation of Odyssey in 1946 and R. A. Knox’s translation of Bible in 1948 were typical popular translations.

The emphasis of translation was on Russian and Nordic works.

From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the literature of Russia and the Nordic countries developed greatly with the emergence of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, Andersen, Ibsen, Strindberg and other world-renowned great writers and dramatists. Their works had attracted the attention of the people in Western Europe and North America so they were competing to learn Russian, Danish and Swedish and had these works translated into English, German and French. In the process of translation, many excellent translators emerged in various countries, among which Garnett is the first to be mentioned.

Translation of Russian literature

Constance Garnet is the most famous female translator in Britain in this century. She translated almost all classic Russian novels and is widely regarded as the most important Translator of translating Russian literature into English.

She published her first translation of Turgenev's novel Ru-Din in 1894. In the following decades, she devoted almost all her energy and time to the translation of Russian literature. She was the first person to translate Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov into English, successively translating all the major works of Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol and Chekhov including 12 volumes of Dostoyevsky's Selected Works translated from 1912 to 1920, 15 volumes of Turgenev's Selected Works translated from 1894 to 1899, 15 volumes of Chekhov's Novels and Plays translated from 1916 to 1922, and 6 volumes of Gogol’s Selected Works translated from 1922 to 1928. In particular, her translations of Turgenev, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and other works were widely welcomed by the English reading community, and thus gave rise to the Russian literature craze in English literature before the First World War. She translated 70 Russian works in her lifetime, making her the most prolific translator of Russian works.

Two other translators who did not translate as much from Russian to English as Garnett, but who had no less influence, were the couple——Louise and Aylmer Maude. They are famous in western modern literary circles for their research and translation of Tolstoy's works. From 1928 to 1937, they spent nearly ten years translating and publishing 21 volumes of The Complete Works of Tolstoy. Later, from 1940s to 1950s, they supplemented or retranslated some of Tolstoy's works, such as What I Believe and Resurrection. In 1952, their work of War and Peace was accepted as a standard English translation and was selected for the prestigious Western Classics Series, thus establishing them as the authoritative English translators of Tolstoy.

In addition, R. S. Townsend, R. Edmonds, Samuel Koteliansky, Ethel C. Mayne, Boris Brasol, Richard Renfield and so on were famous for translating the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Goncharov into English.

Translation of Nordic literature and drama

In the first half of the 20th century, in addition to Russian literature, western European translators showed great interest in Nordic literature and drama, including the works of Andersen, Ibsen and Strindberg.

When Hans Christian Andersen was alive, one of his works was published simultaneously in 15 languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and almost all the major languages of Western Europe. Later, all of his works were translated into different languages, and there were many re-translations in English, French, German and other countries. The first English translator was Mary Howitt, who began translating Andersen’s fairy tales in 1846. Later translators include Charles Boner, Caroline Peachey, Lady Duff Gordon, Paul Leyssac, R. R. Keigwin and R. Spink. Some of the best translations are Leyssac’s translation in 1937, Keigwin’s translation from 1950 to 1960 and Spink’s translation.

The main English translators of Ibsen’s plays are William Archer and James MacFarlane. Archer translated 12 volumes of The Collected Works of H. I. from 1906 to 1912, including almost all of Ibsen’s plays and some of his previously unpublished papers. Macfarlane compiled translated eight volumes of The Oxford Ibsen from 1960 to 1977. In addition, F. E. Garrett translated Lyrics and Poems from Ibsen in 1912. Mary Morison translated The Correspondence of H.I. in 1905. Evert Sprinchorn translated H. I. Letters and Speeches in 1964.

In Germany, the standard German translation is The Collected Plays of Ibsen in ten volumes edited and published by G. Brandes, J. Elias, and P. Schlenther from 1898 to 1902. The standard French translation is The Complete Works of Ibsen in 16 volumes translated and published by P. G. la Chesnais from 1914 to 1945.

Strindberg’s work was translated into English as early as 1912. For the next fifty or sixty years, many people worked on Strindberg’s studies and translations. Major English translators included E. Schleussner, Walter Johnson, M. Sandbach, Elizabeth Sprigge and Michael Meyer. Some good works are Sprigge’s translations of Strinberg’s Plays in 1963 and Meyer’s translations of The Father, Miss Julie, Storm and so on in 1964. In other major western European countries such as Germany and France, Strindberg’s plays were also translated into German and French, and repeatedly staged in Berlin and Paris.

There is no doubt that the translation of modern and contemporary Russian and Nordic literature and drama was a mainstream of western translation in the first half of the century. However, at the same time, it must be pointed out that the mutual translation of modern and contemporary literary works in western European countries still enjoys considerable momentum.

More and more Chinese works were translated.

In the 20th century, more and more people in the West became interested in Chinese culture. Since the 1950s, with the improvement of new China’s international prestige, the fever of translating Chinese works had been constantly appearing in the West. Not only the Four Books, Five Classics, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, A Dream of Red Mansions and the poems of Li Bai, Du Fu and Bai Juyi were translated into English, German and French, but modern writers such as Luxun, Maodun and Bajin were also introduced to western countries.

In the process of translating and introducing Chinese works, excellent translators have emerged from every country. Arthur Waley, the most eminent Sinologist in Britain in the 20th century, was a translator, writer and poet. In 1916, his first translation of Chinese Poems was published. In 1918, he published his second translated work One Hundred Seventy Chinese Poems. These two translations are both from Tang poems. In addition, he also translated part of Journey to the West in 1942, published four other Chinese-English translations, and wrote three books about China or Chinese writers.

Another outstanding Sinologist and translator in the 20th century was Franz Kuhn of Germany. From 1919, when his first translation was published, to his death in 1961, he translated and published more than 40 classical and modern Chinese literary works, including 12 novels and 34 short stories. In particular, his translation of The Fortunate Union in 1926, Second Bloom in 1927, The Golden Lotus in 1930, A Dream of Red Mansions in 1932, Water Margin in 1934, Jade Dragonfly in 1936, Romance of the Three Kingdoms in 1940, Midnight and other works from 1940 to 1955, were well received by German readers.

Translation in Soviet showed its unique characteristics

After the October Revolution, the Russian nation entered the great Soviet era. Fundamental changes in the political system had brought about huge changes in everything including translation. Since then, a clear dividing line had emerged in the practice and theory of translation in the west. One is the translation of western European and North American countries, and the other is the translation of the Soviet Union. Although they have exchanged with each other, they developed along two fundamentally different routes, enriching and developing the translation cause in the West from two different aspects. Here are several distinct characteristics of translation in the socialist Soviet Union.

Marxism-Leninism became the guide of translation practice and translation theory.

Translation must serve the people and socialist construction, which became an important criterion for testing and evaluating all translated works. This marked that Soviet translation appeared on the western translation stage with an unprecedented ideological attitude, and broke away from many traditional western concepts, especially various "art for art’s sake" concepts.

The translation and publication of foreign literature became organized, planned and systematic.

This trait was to Gorky's credit. Under his initiative and leadership, a World Literature Publishing House was established in 1918 in the Soviet Union to publish translations of foreign literature. The original plan was to publish two series: a set of basic series with an estimate of 1,500 books; a set of people’s library series with an estimate of 2500 books. Although the huge publishing plan of the House was not fully realized, the principles advocated by Gorky, namely, selectively translating world classics and improving the level of translation art, had been inherited and carried forward by the Soviet translation and publishing circles. And the translation skills and quality had been improved significantly since the 1930s.

The topic selection of translation was determined strictly according to the ideological, artistic and intellectual value of the original work.

Soviet translation and publishing circles, basing on the principle of critically absorbing foreign culture, translated not only a large number of foreign works of the past, but also a lot of foreign modern works. Especially in the translation of contemporary works of European and American capitalist countries, they strove to use scientific, practical and realistic attitude toward the original works, neither exaggerating the shortcomings of the original work nor demeaning the ideological and artistic value of it.

The mutual translation of various ethnic languages in the Soviet Union was greatly developed.

The Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic country with a variety of national languages. In order to strengthen the mutual understanding and unity among the nationalities, it was necessary to strengthen the translation work among the national languages. In an article published in Pravda on December 7, 1934, Gorky stated: “It would be ideal if every work of each of the allied peoples were translated into the languages of the other peoples of the Soviet Union, for then we would quickly learn to understand the peculiarities and characteristics of each other’s cultures, and this understanding would naturally greatly speed up the process of creating a unified socialist culture...” (quoted from Fedorov,1955:123). Under the domination of this thought, many poets, essayists, writers involved in the translation and introduction of national works. In a short period of twenty or thirty years, hundreds of excellent works of various ethnic groups of the Soviet Union had been translated into Russian, becoming precious treasures of Russian literature.

The principles generally followed in translation were: faithfulness, accuracy and no word-by-word translation.

That is to say, translation should be faithful to the original text in the ideological content and keep the artistic characteristics of the original text; In terms of the expression of the target language, it should accurately use the target language without destroying the expression habits of the language. It can be considered that the dominant method in the Soviet translation circle was the free translation advocated by Pushkin in the early 19th century and Belinsky in the middle. Of course, formalistic and low-quality translations also appeared from time to time, such as those published by some private publishing houses during the period of the New Economic Policy. But on the whole, the principle of free translation, which strives to faithfully reflect the characteristics of the original work and has the same quality as the original work, dominated the translation career of the Soviet Union.

The General Situation of Translation in the Contemporary Age

After the Second World War, the world entered a period of relative peace. After the trauma of the war, the Western countries regrouped and began to restore and develop production and economy in an all-round way. Translation cause also entered a new period of development at extremely rapid pace, taking on a new look. During this period, not only in the Soviet Union, Britain, Germany, France and other major European countries, but also in the United States, Canada, the cause of translation showed a prosperous scene. In terms of the whole western translation career, the translation after the Second World War was unmatched in scope, form, scale and achievement. German translation theorist R. W. Jumpelt called the 20th century "the age of translation" which in fact mainly referred to the decades since the end of the war.

In 1952, the American Encyclopedia Britannica Publishing Company edited and published a set of Great Books of the Western World. This is by far the most complete set of masterpieces published in English. As English original works only account for a small proportion of the series, it is mainly a set of translated works. Among the hundreds of translations, some are new, some are old, some are from the 20th century, and some are from before the 20th century. In short, the editors’ aim is to select the best translations that best represent the original work. In this sense, Great Books of the Western World is a set of authoritative translations. Similar large literary series of translations were also published in France, Germany, the Soviet Union and other countries. Especially in the Soviet Union, the number of foreign literary series translated and published in recent decades was in a leading position. This continued in Russia after the Collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These are the major features of western literary translation in the 20th century. However, despite the great achievements of literary translation, the 20th century is known as the "age of translation" mainly because western translation expanded into various fields during this period, which has five characteristics.

The scale of translation extended to the field of business, diplomacy, science and many other professional affairs.

Since the end of the Second World War, due to practical needs, commercial, diplomatic, scientific and technological translation had flourished, and its momentum even exceeded literary translation, thus forming a major content of the development of modern western translation. Before the First World War, two countries used the language of the more powerful country between them in business transactions. And French was considered the language of diplomacy at international conferences and other diplomatic occasions. So there were few problems in translation before the First World War. However, after the end of the First World War, French lost its dominance, and English rose to take the lead with French, forming a situation in which French and English were used together. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was the beginning of this situation. In 1945, the United Nations was established with English, French, Russian, Chinese and Spanish as the five official and working languages. In 1957, the European Community was founded, consisting of six countries at that time. In 1993, the European Community developed into the European Union. By 2004, it had 25 member states, using nine languages including English, French, German, Italy, Denmark, Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal. That is to say, translation had become an indispensable part of daily work, both for communicating with countries in other regions and among western countries. According to UNESCO, the number of translations in the world increased four-and-a-half times from 1948 to 1970. The institutions of the European Common Market employed more than 1,300 employees to deal with translation, of whom 450 were full-time interpreters, 550 translators and others were freelance employees on short-term contracts.

Translation teaching was widespread.

With the establishment of the United Nations and its specialized agencies, as well as the establishment of international institutions such as the European Common Market (EC, EU) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the need for translators was increasing. To meet this need, a number of schools specializing in training translators had been set up. The most prominent are the High School of Translation at the Third University of Paris and the School of Translation at the University of Ottawa. Many universities in Europe and the United States also offer translation classes or courses in senior grades. 2.3 Translators’ associations were established and publications on translation studies were launched.

Translators in different countries set up various translation associations and publications. Each association had its own purpose to carry out its work effectively. Translation associations or federations in European and American capitalist countries, in particular, generally emphasize the following principles: to clarify the legal status of translators through legislative means; to take effective measures to protect the legal rights of translators (especially the copyright that translators should enjoy); to improve their social status and increase their economic income; to improve the learning and working conditions of translators to provide them with opportunities to constantly improve their translation skills and a good working environment.

There were more translators’ organizations in the United States than in other western countries, with a total of 30, among which the most influential were the American Society of Translators, the American Federation of Linguists and the Literary Society of America. The journal of the American Society of Translators was ATA Chronicle. The journal of the Literary Society of America was Translation Review.

In Canada, major translation associations included the Canadian Council of Translators and Interpreters, the Ontario Association of Translators and Interpreters, the Business Language Centre, and the Quebec Translation Association. The Ontario Association of Translators and Interpreters founded the journal of Inform ATIO. The most influential professional translation magazine in Canada was Meta: Journal des Traducteurs.

In Britain, major translation associations included the Association of Translation Companies of Great Britain, the Association of Translators and the Guild of Translators, of which the Guild of Translators was the most famous. The official publication of the guild is The Incorporated Linguist, which was published in 1962 and enjoyed high reputation in Britain.

There were two major translation associations in France: the Association of French Translators and the Association of French Literary Translators. There were also two major translation associations in West Germany, one was the Association of Federation Translators and Interpreters and the other was the German-speaking World Federation of Literary and Technical Translators. In addition, Austria, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium and other Western European countries also had local or national translation organizations and a variety of translation publications.

Machine translation developed.

In the process of more than two thousand years of development, the traditional translation method had not undergone substantial changes in technology, and the translation between the two languages still had to be carried out by hand. However, due to the increasingly frequent international scientific and cultural exchanges, manual translation could no longer timely meet the needs. Therefore, when the traditional manual translation was facing the challenge of the times, machine translation should be born.

In the 1930s, machine translation began to be envisaged. In 1933, American scientist George Artsouni put forward the idea of using machines to translate languages, and designed a translation machine he called "Machine Brain". His design had practical reference significance for electronic translation technology. However, Artsouni’s invention occurred in the age of non-electronic computing technology, so it was limited by the age. Although he started to put his idea of machine translation into practice, his machine translation idea and the "translation machine" developed by him could not truly achieve "automatic" translation due to the age limit. It was with the advent of the electronic age that the truly "automatic" translator came into being.

In 1946, under the auspices of the United States Army headquarters, J.P. Eckert and J.W. Mauchly who were both from the University of Pennsylvania developed the world’s first electronic computer named: Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, or ENIAC for short. Computer’s astonishing speed inspired people to consider the innovation of translation technology. Therefore, in the same year, Andrew Booth and Warren Weaver first proposed the use of computers in the machine translation system. Since then, machine translation and machine translation research, driven by modern electronic computing technology officially began.

American science, especially the development of computer science, to a large extent affected the development of computer science in the whole West and even the world. Therefore, especially in the pioneering period, the development history and model of Machine translation in America can almost be regarded as those in the whole West. In this sense, the development of machine translation in the west (and even the world) can be roughly divided into the following five major periods, just like the development of Machine translation in the United States: initial stage; high stage; low stage; recovery stage; vigorous stage. The following is a further overview of the five development periods of machine translation in the West (mainly in the United States).

initial stage (1946—1954)

The pioneering period begins with Booth and Weaver’s idea of translating natural language by computer in 1954, and ends with the birth of the first machine translation system. After the idea of using computers to translate was put forward, although there was great resistance in the United States at first, the voice supporting it was mainstream. In particular, Weaver published a memorandum on machine translation in 1949, which not only opened up a series of research topics on machine translation in the United States, but also had a wide influence in western countries. The memo makes four basic points: the problem of polysemy can be solved by context; there is a logical basis in language; there are basic probabilities in language application; there are common elements in different languages. These are still the fundamental of the development of machine translation. In the following years, machine translation research had been actively carried out in some universities and organizations in the United States and Britain. In Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first full-time machine translation researcher Bar-Hillel arrived, he made a great contribution to the early development of machine translation and put forward the main problems and basic strategies needed to be solved in machine translation research. The first machine translation conference was held at MIT in June 1952, after which machine translation research in the United States began to accelerate. In 1954, a machine translation system for computer was developed and demonstrated. Although the machine translation system was small, consisting of only 250 Russian words, six grammar rules, and a few translation examples, it first showed the public and the scientific community the feasibility of machine translation, inspiring substantial funding from U.S. government for machine translation research over the next decade.

High stage(1954—1966)

The successful demonstration of the world’s first machine translation system, the Georgetown-IBM system of United States, marked the first development climax of machine translation. The upsurge began in 1954 and lasted for 12 years. In the mid-1950s, inspired by successful demonstration of machine translation system, dozens of universities, companies, and government agencies in the United States began machine translation research programs. On the one hand, due to the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union at that time, the United States military, the National Science Foundation, the Central Intelligence Agency and so on needed to acquire a large amount of scientific and technological information of the Soviet Union, so that they invested a lot in machine translation, especially Russian-English translation. On the other hand, advanced computers in the United States provided good equipment for the development of the first generation of machine translation system. At the same time, many universities and institutions in most European countries had also carried out machine translation research.

Low Stage (1966—1975)

The advent of machine translation had opened up a new way for traditional translation research and practice. However, the complexity of machine translation was underestimated at that time and the design of machine translation system was often too rough and simple. In this case, the first generation of machine translation systems in the initial stage could not achieve ideal results, the quality of translation is often poor, so that some people gradually lost confidence in machine translation research, and some scholars also became pessimistic and disappointed.

In the mid-1960s, machine translation in the United States had suffered a severe blow. In 1966, the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee, part of the National Academy of Sciences, was asked to investigate machine translation research funded by government. The committee published its report, Language and Machines, after analyzing the speed, quality, cost and demand of machine translation at that time. The report pointed out that the quality of machine translation is significantly lower than that of human translation and asserted that there was no likelihood of any commercially useful machine translation system in the foreseeable future. On the committee’s recommendation, the U.S. government withdrew the funding for machine translation research. Thus, machine translation research in the United States plummeted from a high point to a low point of development. It should be noted, however, that machine translation research and development was not in a complete demise, following the official denials in the United States. Scholars and research institutions in many countries including the United States continued to carry out researches and experiments on machine translation under relatively difficult circumstances.

Recovery stage(1975—1989)

In the middle of 1970s, with the emergence of new theories and ideas in the field of linguistics and the further development of computational linguistics, the research of machine translation was aroused in the world again. After ten years of silence, machine translation research stepped on the road of recovery. The recovery period of machine translation research and development is generally considered to date from the installation of the SYSTRAN system by EURATOM and the completion of the TAUM-METEO system by the University of Montreal in Canada.

Vigorous stage（1989—）

Since the late 1980s, some new developments had changed the field of machine translation, marking machine translation research enter a new period. This is the emergence of the third generation of machine translation method that is corpus-based. Corpus-based machine translation systems include statistic-based translation and example-based translation, both of which are based on large-scale real text.

Practice has proved that machine translation has great vitality. It is a new science, and its research and translation have entered a new stage of development. No matter whether it can replace the human brain and hands eventually and completely liberate human from the heavy artificial translation, it will develop and exist for a long time. Both in theory and practice, machine translation and its research will exert more and more influence on traditional translation and its research.

Works on translation theory were emerging one after another.

The most important feature of modern western translation is the rapid development of translation theory. After the Second World War, with the vigorous development of science and technology, modern linguistics, translation activities and the rise of machine translation, people gradually changed the traditional view of translation studies, believing that translation is not only an art or skill, but also a science with rules to follow. Translation study is a discipline related to literature and art, sociology, psychology, numerical control theory, information theory and so on. Translation theory should no longer be a by-product of philosophers, writers and translators, but should become a serious subject systematically discussed by experts in language and translation studies. In such an academic atmosphere, translation theory had been updated and the study of translation problems had made a great step forward. Theorists published a great deal of academic papers in the journals of translation societies, linguistic societies or literary societies, as well as in academic journals.It is a popular practice to divide contemporary western translation theories into different schools according to their basic approaches and methods of translation studies or the basic characteristics of thought. Here is a brief introduction to some influential schools.

American Translation Training School: First established in 1964 at the University of Iowa, this school focused on translation practice, emphasized the literary taste and value of works, and adopted the methods of L. A. Richards and Williard V. Quine of Harvard University. Representative figures included poet and translator Ezra Pound, who translated Tang poetry and advocated the accurate restoration of details, words, fragments and the whole image description. Frederic Will of the University of Iowa, drawing on his training experience, regarded translation as a form of naming, fiction writing and cognition. Yale’s Jonas Zdnys argued that translation is an activity of subjective thought designed to explain literature. This school explores the role of the human mind in translation and raises the question of the nature of translation, but translation theory was limited to aesthetic experience and prescriptive translation rules.

Translation Science School: it was also known as “linguistic school”. According to this school, translation is the process of reproducing language as a whole, and it aims to correctly convey the original information to readers. The school was founded by Eugene Nida, whose masterpieces include Message and Mission (1960) and Toward Science of Translation (1946). Nida proposed functional equivalence theory according to Noam Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar and his experience in Bible translation, that is, to digest the original text and understand its basic structure and meaning; convey meaning based on basic structure; obtain semantic and stylistic equivalence with the original text. Thus the translation process can be summarized as: analyze—transfer—restructure, these three steps. The school of Translation science adopted linguistic theory and the more objective description method in translation theory. In the late 1970s, emphasis was placed on the cultural background of the information age, but the research was still limited to prescriptive research and translation criteria, ignoring the role of translators’ thinking.

Translation school: it is the so-called “literary school”. This school held that the original work is the unity of sentence series and article structure, and the translator is influenced by the original view and the future model of translation in the process of translation. The founder of this school was James Holmes, an American poet, who taught translation at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands before his death. His representative work is The Name and Nature of Translation Studies (1972).

Polysystem School: the founders are Itammar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury of Tel Aviv University in Israel. Even coined the term Polysystem to explore the relationship between translated works and literary systems, and explained that the oriented culture of translation not only determines whether a work can be translated, but also regulates the wording. Toury held that translation belongs to the second system of multiple systems, and its role depends on the strength and development stage of the oriented culture of translation. He held that translation has no fixed identity and has multiple identities due to its social, literary and historical background. This school integrates translation studies with literary studies, social and economic factors, endows translation studies with historical significance, but it is still limited to the acceptability of translation and does not get rid of the fetters of cultural equivalence.

Deconstruction School: it is also known as “affirmative productivity school”. It originated in France in the mid-1960s and is represented by Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. This school introduced deconstruction into translation, claiming that translators create the subject and the target language is a new language. As Foucault put it, the original work is constantly rewritten in the process of translation, and the translator rewrites the original work every time he reads and translates it. Deconstruction studies the nature and process of translation and language, and advocates that translators exist as entities. The school even goes so far as to believe that language does not involve any objective reality, and translators have their own status only when they create texts.

Conclusion

Under the influence of historical backgrounds, different periods of translation show different traits. In the modern period, the content of translation still focused on literature which included works form Russian, Nordic countries, China and so on. The way of translation was artificial and traditional. With the progress of economy and science, translation in the contemporary period also got great development. The content of translation was not confined to the field of literature. Instead, translation of science and technology, commerce, entertainment and so on became a major part of the actual translation activities. In addition, machine translation as a novel technique developed quickly. And the most important feature of modern western translation is the rapid development of translation theory thanks to many translator associations and publications on translation studies. Nowadays, under the influence of globalization, translation shows more and more importance and will get better development environment.

Reference

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