风物常宜放眼量:西方学术文化与中西学术翻译

A Cultural Turn for Scholarly Translation in China?

学术文化最终决定学术作品的意义并使一切学术性表述和解读成为可能。在进行中西学术翻译时如果忽略"西方学术"这个整体框架,仅在相关学科、学派及其"专业知识"的小圈子内考虑对源文本的理解和再表述,就容易造成译者无视作品的智力大前提和意识形态底蕴,从某些有关西方学术话语的想当然认定出发确定自己的解读和翻译策略等严重后果。深化对当代西方智力环境的总体了解对于提高西方学术作品汉译的质量关系甚大。中国学术翻译期盼着一个"文化转换"。

Enabling scholarly publications and determining the way they signify, represent, and interpret, the academic culture associated with scholarly source texts ought to serve as the framework within which to translate them into any other language. A myopic preoccupation with discipline- or even theoretical model-generated 'specialized knowledge', as the sole basis for dealing with scholarly translation, has often led to a neglect of the source texts' unspoken intellectual and ideological premises and a tendency to impose on their interpretation the translator's own assumptions about the academic discourse in question. Such a tendency has marred a considerable portion of recent Chinese translations of Western scholarly works, resulting in confusion and misunderstanding among their readers. The need to have the problem remedied calls for a 'cultural turn' in China's scholarly translation.