Literary Translation: Complete Comprehension Entails Thorough Translation?——A Comparative Analysis of Li Xiyin's and Sun Zhili's Chinese Translations of The Old Man and the Sea

Literary translation requires a complete comprehension of literariness, which in turn entails a faithful reproduction in the target text. Based on a comparative study on the two Chinese translations of the first paragraph in The Old Man and the Sea, the paper argues that a thorough translation of a literary piece, largely determined by the translator's realm, is mainly achieved by his/her adoption of correspondence with the supplementation of other six methods of Complete Translation, i. e., addition, reduction, transposition, conversion, combination, division and combination. Reduction may be used for the source literary text not to be translated thoroughly. "Not to be translated thoroughly" does not mean "unthorough translation", which can be divided into too thorough translation and lack of thorough translation, both against the principle of pursuing "maximum similarity" in Complete Translation.