意义的模糊性与汉英翻译中的词义选择

语言作为反映客观世界和表达思维成果的方式存在着确定性和模糊性的双重特征。翻译活动需要在不同语族的语言之间或者同一语族的不同语言进行词语间的同义转换,然而不同语言之间的词语很少存在严格的对应关系,翻译活动中的词义选择问题由此而生。如何恰当处理意义的模糊性和传达原文真实意义之间的矛盾,引发了作者的思考。该文从文化巨著《红楼梦》的杨宪益汉英译文中的选取了部分例子,对于词义选择现象进行分类探讨,希望能够为译者在从事汉英翻译活动中的词义选择时提供借鉴和指导。

On the Fuzziness of Lexical Meaning and Word Selection in E-C Translation

As a way to reflect the objective world and express human mind thoughts,language has the double characteristics:the definiteness and fuzziness.The fuzziness of language plays an important role in reader’s understanding of the texts and writer’s thoughts,especially in reading a text in foreign language.Translation,as an interlingual discipline,needs to translate lexical meaning between languages within or not within single language branch.But there are rare strict equivalence between words and forthcoming the problem of word selection.The writer of this paper wants to deal with the conflicts in solving fuzziness of lexical meaning and expressing the genuine meaning of the original text.This paper draws examples from the translated version of A Dream of Red Mansions by Yang Xianyi,and discuss word selection in different groups.This paper could hopefully provide guidance to the translators when facing the problem of word selection in their E-C translations.