A Study on "Text-less Back-translation" "Text-lost Back-translation" and "Cultural Restoration"

Text-less back-translation has become a hot issue in Translation Studies in China.But the definition and reference of it are somewhat obscure.This fuzziness further leads to the uncertainty of the meaning of back-translation.The reason for this fuzziness lies in the fact that discussions of back translation have often been coupled with restoration and cultural restoration in Chinese contexts.Whereas in English back translation and restoration are not inexorably linked together, and sometimes even represent opposite meanings.Cultural restoration hinges on the likeness, especially of linguistic forms to translators.The so-called text-less back translation, which targets at cultural restoration, is not necessarily a back translation at first place.However, text-less back translation in its real sense does exist for the loss of original work.In order to differentiate it with the present text-less back-translation, this paper calls it text-lost back-translation.Although text-less back-translation is not a back-translation, which can only be deemed as a pseudo back-translation but it is no coincidence that real back-translations and pseudo ones share much in common.For example, similar translation tactics (the imitation of Chinese texts the original authors write or translate), identical reading expectation (passing for originals) and the same translation goal — cultural restoration.