When Yan Fu (1853-1921), a well-known scholar and translator, put forth his three-character criteria of translation (1896), he hardly expected that the criteria he had laid down would spark off a controversy that was to go on for almost a century. It is the purpose of this article to make a brief summary of the arguments for and against his criteria and to justify Yan's criteria on linguistic grounds, so as to give Western readers a rough picture of the situation in the translators' circle in China.