File:On Current Situation of the Translation of Chinese Literary Works.docx

Abstract:The translation circle has always paying great attention to these two questions: Whether changes should be made to the original texts during the translation of literary works or not, and how to define the proper degree of the change. And to these two controversial problems, views differ from person to person, and the related discussions were pushed to a new high after Mo Yan, the Chinese writer, got the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. In this paper, I’m going to sort out and do some contrastive analysis between several different views towards the above questions, and share my own thoughts and suggestions of the translation of Chinese literary works and of the current situation of the overseas distribution of Chinese literature. In my opinion, the translator, as an initiative individual independent from the author and an important mediator of trans-context communication of culture, is completely capable and responsible to promote the original texts’ interaction with the foreign readers in the language environment of the target language through more flexible methods of translation. And this kind of reaction is bound to set a standard, which is much higher than the so-called “literal translation” or “direct translation”, for the translator, and that means to make some proper adjustments to the original texts. But the adjustments must be limited in a certain range, based on the principle that the main plots and the initial attempts and ideas of the author can’t be changed or twisted. Otherwise, it’s better to call it an “adapted version” rather than a piece of “translation”.