“无产者”,还是“劳动者”?——基于语料库的《共产党宣言》结束语翻译研究

《共产党宣言》是马克思和恩格斯在1848年以德语发表的纲领性著作,他们在其中发出伟大号召——“Proletarier aller L?nder,vereinigt euch!”——它成为全世界无产阶级英勇斗争的动员令。该口号译法众多,仅汉译就有74种,主语Proletarier也有16种翻译,又以“劳动者”和“无产者”数量最多。那么究竟是“无产者”还是“劳动者”更恰当呢?这已引起学者们的广泛讨论,且观点各异。本文认为理解和翻译一个词不能脱离其使用的环境和时代,基于历时语料库讨论该问题比较合适。鉴于此,本研究对三个语料库进行检索并得出结论:Proletarier和Arbeiter在德语中,Proletarians和Working men在英语中,“无产者”和“劳动者”在汉语中,均有各自的使用语境和趋势,不能将二者简单视为同一概念。因此,“无产者”是一个更恰当的译法。

The Communist Manifesto as a programmatic work is published in German by Marx and Engels in 1848.They issued the great call--“Proletarier aller Lander,vereinigt euch!”This slogan became an order for the heroic struggle of the proletariat around the world.Besides,it has 74 translations in Chinese and there are 16 translations of Proletarier.And two choices,laodongzhe and wuchanzhe,are employed most frequently.So is wuchanzhe or laodongzhe more suitable?This has aroused extensive discussions among scholars,and their views are different.This article believes understanding and translating a word cannot be in isolation from the context and the era,and it seems more appropriate to analyze this issue on the basis of diachronic corpora.In view of this,this research retrieves the data from three corpora and draws conclusions:Proletarier and Arbeiter in German,Proletarians and Working men in English,and wuchanzhe and laodongzhe in Chinese have their own context and trends,and the two concepts cannot be simply regarded as the same one.As a result,wuchanzhe is the more appropriate choice.