关键词: 翻译, 定义, 本质目标, 偏离, 迷失

Abstract: Professor Xie Tianzhen speaks very highly of an interpretation of the Chinese character 译 (yi) by Jia Gongyan, a well-known scholar of the Tang Dynasty in that it covers both the language transformation and the fundamental goal of translation. As a matter of fact, the so-called fundamental goal is not unfamiliar to people in the field of translation studies. This paper holds that some widely-used dictionaries are not deviating from or getting lost in the fundamental goal of translation at all although we cannot read such words as helping people speaking different languages to understand and communicate with each other in their definitions of translation, since there could and should be more than one way to define any term.