从忠实的角度对比The Sketch Book:The Author’s Account of Himself两个中译本

A Comparison of Two Chinese Versions of The Sketch Book: The Author’s Account of Himself from the Perspective of Faithfulness

The Sketch Book:The Author's Account of Himself是华盛顿·欧文的一篇游记散文,其语言凝练典雅,文风多变,时而庄重时而诙谐。文章首先对该篇散文的研究现状进行了梳理,发现众多学者从各个角度对其进行了研究,但是从忠实的角度进行研究的还为数不多。因此,文章拟从这一角度出发,分别从语义和风格两个层面对比林纾和高健的中译本。通过对比发现,在语义上,林纾的译本有多处翻译不够准确甚至完全翻译错误,而高健的译本用词精准,翻译准确,十分忠实与原文;在风格上,林译的文言文以及高译的白话文夹杂文言文都传达了原作古朴典雅的风格,但后者更加忠实地再现了原作多变的文风。因此,相比之下,高译不论从语义还是风格上都比林译更胜一筹。

The Sketch Book: The Author’s Account of Himself is an essay of travel written by Washington Irving. The language of the essay is concise and elegant and its style is variable from solemn to humorous. After reviewing the previous studies on the essay, it can be found that many researches have been done from various respects but few of them do it from the perspective of faithfulness. Therefore, this paper tries to make a comparison between two Chinese versions of the essay at both semantic and stylistic level in the perspective of faithful. It is found that at the semantic level, Lin Shu’s version has many places mistranslated or left out while Gao jian’s version is accurate in diction of words and very faithful to the original work; at the stylistic level,both classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese adopted by Lin and Gao convey the elegant style of the original text, however, the latter more faithfully reproduces its variable style. Thus it can be concluded that compared with Lin’s version, Gao’s version is better at both semantic and stylistic level.