Literary Translation Is Real Translation

赵彦春

A translation of a literary text should be literary, or as literary as the original. Otherwise, a translator fails in the purport of the text and his endeavor. What is literariness? Or in other words, what does the literariness of a text consist of? It seems to be a mythic question to answer, however, no critic or theoretician can avoid this question, especially when it concerns translation of a literary text. Actually, it is simple. Roughly, it is the form of a text that is suggestive of something. That is to say, when the form of a text suggests a meaning or implicature, it is a literary text. Of course, all texts have a form. The difference is that: The form of non-literary text or an ordinary text  does not suggest anything.  For example, what I am writing here means what I mean, but no more. In short, the form of the text does not carry a meaning. A poem like This World's April Day expresses not only the ideational information of the text, it carries a rich resource of connotations, like those conveyed through the use of metaphors, personifications and imagery, and those conveyed through the employment of pattern, style, meter and rhyme. All these features are reduced to one thing, that is, the literary form of the text. The form of a literary text is a matter of the mind. What is in the mind of an original reader should be that in the mind of a translation reader. So reasonably, a good translation should be one that keeps all these features.
    A literary translation is real translation, because it requires a translator to be highly exact and at the same time higly felxible. Look at the translation of This World's April Day to see where it is exact and where the translator took to his flexibility.
 
For the basics, we follow Timothy Huson's Guidelines.
 
The best translation is faithful in the broad sense of the word, considering the meaning, the imagery, the tone, the ambiguity, suggestiveness, and the narrative structure. The full range od literary tropes employed in the original should be employed as much as possible preserved in the translation. 
 
Procedures
 
--word choice--
 
1. Do not try to improve the original author's word choice, but rather seek to capture it.
2. Every significant word in the original must be in some way capturedin the translation and every word in the translation needs to be supported by the original.
3. Do not translate the implicit meaning of a Chinese word or phrase into an English word or phrase that makes that meaning explicit. That is, if at all possible, retain metaphors and imagery in the translation, rather than making them explicit, and as far as possible, use the same metaphor and imagery in English.
4. When they can be understood, translate Chinese idioms directly and literally rather than rendering them with English or western cliches (except the Chinese itself is using a western cliche).
5.  Do not add remarks or choose words to bring out what you think what the author should have said, but rather render a text that leaves to the reader of the translation an interpretive task similar to that of the reader of the original. Remember that  ambiguity and counter-intuitive word choices are an essential part of creative writing, and should be retained if at all possible.    
 
--style--
 
6. Do not try to improve or change the original auhor's style , but rather try to capture it.
7. As far as possible, make your English as simple and concise as the Chinese. For example, if possible, find an English word or expression that largely carries the nuances of the Chinese word or expression rather than expounding all of those nuances in English.
8. When they are clearly indicated, direct discourse and indirect discourse in the Chinese text should remain the same in the translation if at all possible.
 
--punctuation and structure--
 
9. Do not try to improve or change the original author's puctuation, but rather to capture it.
10. Use the same paragraph divisions in the translation as appear in the original.
11. Strive initially to capture the sentence divisions of the Chinese text (try not to break up long sedntences or combine short ones), and deviate from the original only when other considerations make it necessary.
12. Dashes, semi-colomns, exclamation marks should be retained in the transaltions when possible.
13. Initially strive to preserve roughly the same order of phrases or clauses within a sentence, and vary this to the extent that smoothness and meaning requires it.
 
The basic guidelines are helpful, but these alone do not necessarily ensure the success of a translation because they may fail in verse translation or translation of such wordplay as tongue twisters.  That is why flexibility is necessary condition of a translator.