The translation criterion ──faithfulness,clarity and elegance──has beenwidely accepted in China as a yardstick,for a time among some people,as the only one,to judge translations.Though concise and seemingly all embracing.the criterion is,according to the author,has its limitations in practice.The criterion may be expounded in two senses.One is that the originals are both expressive and elegant,when faithfully and skillfully rendered in the target language,the same effect can be achieved.This is a sense relatively highly applicable.Another is to direct the main efforts to making the translation in the target language expressive and elegant to suit his own and his contemporary readers’ taste.Yan Fu,a noted late Qing Dynasty translator,a chief exponent of the criterion,actually followed the criterion in the second sense in his practice.As actualoriginals,so varied,are not always expressive and elegant enough to meet the requirements,some deliberately for certain needs and some inadvertently due to the inadequacies on the part of the writers,the translators’endeavor to achieve expressiveness and elegance on such a basis is bound to run counter to faithfulness.A few instances from the practice of translation are given to illustrate the point.So far quite a few scholars and translators have tried to modify the criterion by proposing their new criteria,but none of them can really resolve the contradiction between theory and practice.The way out is not to stick to the criterion or to its modified ones,but to subject everything to the aim for which a piece of translation is intended.An elaboration of this will be given in another article.