0.1.3 Studies of translation criticism and criticism of literary translation

As far as translation criticism is concerned,the study on it is quite insufficient.Translation criticism,according to James Holmes(1988),belongs to the Applied Translation Studies.“Applied Translation Studies” distinguishes itself from the“Pure Translation Studies”,referring mainly to the application of translation theories to translator training and translation criticism,translation policy etc.Translation criticism is thus supposed to be practical-oriented and depends largely on the development of translation theories as the latter are supposed to provide the former with principles and criteria.Holmes believes that descriptive and theoretical translation studies provide the scholarly findings for translation criticism and that “[t]he level of such criticism is today still frequently very low,and in many countries still quite uninfluenced by the developments within the field of translation studies”(Holmes 1988: 79).

In the West,the practical orientation of translation criticism has a far-reaching influence on the development of the study on translation criticism.Most of the relevant works are concerned with,actually,the assessment of translation quality.The underdevelopment of translation criticism can be easily seen as one cannot find the term “translation criticism” in all the influential dictionaries of Translation Studies published in the West.Most of the researches and writings on criticism of literary translation in the West are unsystematic too,as underdeveloped as translation criticism as a whole.

In China,there are many articles and books on or touching upon translation criticism,including criticism of literary translation.However,most of them are not systematized.There are only three monographs concentrating on translation criticism:Yang Xiaorong's Introduction to Translation Criticism in 2005,Wen Jun's Introduction to Criticism of Technical Translation in 2006,and Lv Jun and Hou Xiangqun's An Introduction to the Science of Translation Criticism in 2009.And two monographs on criticism of literary translation are Studies on Criticism of Literary Translation written by Xu Jun in 1992 and On the Criticism of Literary Translation by Wang Hongyin in 2006.Nevertheless,as is Richards' often-quoted words,translation “is probably the most complex type of event in the history of the cosmos”(Nida 1993: 1),and so far as translation criticism is concerned,especially criticism of literary translation,things become even more complicated.Compared with numerous translation of literary works there exist in the world,we can say that our study on criticism of literary translation is rather inadequate around the world.