严复中英文简介

精品文档 1欢迎下载 严复 1853 1921 triple principle of translation 信 faithfulness 忠实准确 达 expressiveness 通顺流畅 雅 elegance 文字古雅 Yan fu put forward this three character guide in his preface to the translation of T H Huxley s book Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays 天演论 译例言 1898 译事三难信达雅 求其信已大难矣 顾信矣不达 虽译尤不译也 则达尚焉 易曰修辞立诚 子曰辞达而已 又曰言之无文 行 之不远 三者乃文章正轨 亦即为译事楷模 故信达而外 求其尔 雅 此不仅期以行远已耳 实则精理微言 用汉以前字法句法 则 为达易 用近世利俗文字 则求达雅 往往抑义就词 毫厘千里 审择于斯二者之间 夫固有所不得已 岂钓奇哉 Translation has to do three difficult things to be faithful expressive and elegant It is difficult enough to be faithful to the original and yet if a translation is not expressive it is tantamount to having no translation Hence expressiveness should be required too The Book of Changes says that the first requisite of 精品文档 2欢迎下载 rhetoric is truthfulness Confucius says that expressiveness is all that matters in language He adds that if one s language lacks grace it won t go far These three qualities then are the criteria of good writing and I believe of good translation too Hence besides faithfulness and expressiveness I also aim at elegance I strive for elegance not just to make my translations travel far but to express the original writer s ideas better for I find that subtle thoughts are better expressed in the vocabulary and syntax of pre Han prose than those of the vulgar writings of today Using the latter often leads to distortion of meaning which however slight results in vast misunderstanding Weighing the pros and cons I opted for the former as a matter of necessity not trying to be different YanYan FuFu simplified Chinese 严复 traditional Chinese 嚴復 pinyin Y n F Wade Giles YenYen FuFu 精品文档 3欢迎下载 courtesy name JiJi DaoDao 幾道 8 January 1854 27 October 1921 was a Chinese scholar and translator most famous for introducing western ideas including Darwin s natural selection to China in the late 19th century Life Yan Fu studied at the Fujian Arsenal Academy 福州船政學堂 in Fuzhou Fujian Province In 1877 79 he studied at the Navy Academy in Greenwich England Upon his return to China he was unable to pass the Imperial Civil Service Examination while teaching at the Fujian Arsenal Academy and then Beiyang Naval Officers School 北洋水師學堂 at Tianjin It was not until after the Chinese defeat in the First Sino Japanese War 1894 95 fought for control of Korea that Yan Fu became famous He is celebrated for his translations including Thomas Huxley s Evolution and Ethics Adam Smith s Wealth of Nations John Stuart Mill s On Liberty and Herbert Spencer s Study of Sociology Yan 精品文档 4欢迎下载 critiqued the ideas of Darwin and others offering his own interpretations The ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest were introduced to Chinese readers through Huxley s work The former idea was famously rendered by Yan Fu into Chinese as ti nz 天擇 He became a respected scholar for his translations and became politically active In 1895 he was involved in the Gongche Shangshu movement In 1912 he became the first principal of National Peking University now Peking University Translation theory Yan stated in the preface to his translation of Evolution and Ethics 天演論 that there are three difficulties in translation faithfulness expressiveness and elegance 譯事三難 信達雅 He did not set them as general standards for translation and did not say that they were independent of each other However since the publication 精品文档 5欢迎下载 of that work the phrase faithfulness expressiveness and elegance has been attributed to Yan Fu as a standard for any good translation and has become a clich in Chinese academic circles giving rise to numerous debates and theses Some sch