情动于中而形于言——小说翻译中的移情与表达

Empathy and Expression in Fiction Translation——Linguistic Forms as Reflections of One's Affection

文学翻译最重要的就是要移情。就小说翻译而言,译者既要移情于原文的对话、原文的人物描写、原文的修辞艺术、原文的情境、原文通篇的文体风格、原文叙事的视角,又要移情于译文语言的铺陈习惯和文本规约。结合鲁迅短篇小说《一件小事》一个片段的两个英译文,本文深入分析了两位译者在各自译文中移情的情况,同时还以翻译大家之翻译经验及其有关翻译的论述,进一步论证了移情对于翻译的重要性。

What counts most in literary translation is empathy,a sense of shared experience,including emotionaland physical feelings,with someone or something other than oneself.As far as fiction translation is concerned,thetranslator should on the one hand empathetically fully engage himself/herself in the source language(SL)dialogues,theSL description of characters,the SL rhetorical art,the SL situations,the SL global textual styles and the SL narrativeperspectives,and on the other,in the narrative and textual conventions of the target language(TL).With reference totwo translations of a segment from Lu Xun’s short story“An Incident”,the present paper analyzes two translators’different degrees of empathy in their respective translations with comments by its author and also presents remarks byexperienced translators on both translation practice and translation theory underscoring the importance of empathy inthe translation process.