反思“通顺”—从诗学的角度看“通顺”在文学翻译中的副作用

王东风
 (中山大学外国语学院，广州 510275)

摘要： 如果说翻译的第一标准是“忠实”的话，那么第二标准就非“通顺”莫属了。作为翻译的一个强制性标准，“通顺”是一个以译文读者为取向的概念，因此译者为迎合读者的阅读畅快必然会用本土的语言价值观压制原文的诗学话语，原文充满陌生化的文学性或他性被这“通顺”的“熨斗”一熨，还会留下多少陌生、多少写意的放纵，值得我们反思。本文试从诗学的角度对这一标准给文学翻译所造成的负面影响进行剖析。
 

Rethinking Fluency from a Poetic Perspective
 

Wang Dongfeng
(School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China)
 

Abstract: If fidelity is deemed the first criterion of translation, the second should certainly go to fluency. As an obligatory criterion, fluency is in essence a target-reader-oriented concept, one which obliges translators to repress the poetic discourse in the original so as to meet the target reader’s “hasty eye to catch”. What invites rethinking here is that when the original literariness or otherness, which is loaded with a sense of the strange, is “ironed out” by fluency, how much room is still left in the translated texts for the strange and the poetic. This paper tries to address this issue by investigating into the negative effects which the demand for fluency is likely to cause on literary translation.