The Return Of Treason: Inter-subjectivity In Lin Yutang's Six Chapters Of A Floating Life

Under the overwhelming power of Cultural Turn, Deconstruction as well as Hermeneutics and Reception theory, the study of translation subjectivity has been pushed into the Translator-Centered paradigm from Source Text-Centered paradigm. The Translator-Centered paradigm is characterized by regarding the translator as the translation subject and emphasizing his creativity, elevating the construction of text meaning from the point of readers much higher than the author of the original text, even announcing the'death'of the author. As a consequence, translation study has been liberated from the constraints of Source-Text centralism, and even got into an authorless world. Naturally, translator has been the"betrayer, conqueror, and rewriter"standing at the forefront. With the increase of translator's freedom, translation becomes a rewriting, a manipulation or even a pseudo-translation. Worrying deeply about the situations have been resulted, the writer of this thesis is trying to explore the subjectivity of translation under the guidance of intersubjectivity. The source text author, translator and target text reader are all subjects but of different natures, namely, creative subject, translation subject and receptive subject respectively. They all have the function of the subjects, in other words, they all have subjectivity. The subjectivity of the source text author is decided by the fact that the translation is worked on the source text, while the subjectivity of the target text reader is standing for the norms and constraints of the target culture in the translation activities. And translation activity is regarded as a dialogue among the translator, source text author and target text reader with the given text as the topic, the translation text is the result of balance and negotiation between them so that to prevent translator's subjective initiative becomes limitless writing.The thesis consists of five chapters: chapter one gives a brief introduction on the research background, the research scope and objectivity, the research methodology and the significance of the translation intersubjectivity. In chapter two, the philosophical turn from subjectivity into intersubjectivity is briefly introduced. Including a discussion about the unitary subjectivity as well as its relevant problems in the three paradigms, and a presentation on a critical survey of the current scholarship concerning translation intersubjectivity what can be as a solution for the problems resulted by the unitary subjectivity. Chapter three and Chapter four form the most important parts of this thesis. Applying Gadamer's Fusion of Horizons, Jauss's Horizon of Expectation and Bakhtin's Dialogism into the intersubjective study of translation, and detailing what kind of dialogues come into being between the STA, translator and TTR. Following the case study of Lin Yutang's Six Chapters of a Floating Life, the intersubjectivity dialogue between the STA, translator and TTR is verified useful for the translator to balance or harmonize the conflicts between the understanding and expressing in order to produce a good work what includes creative but without treason. Chapter five, the conclusion, mainly reaffirms what the translation intersubjectivity is in this thesis; what kind of intersubjective dialogue is established in the translator's understanding and expressing; and how the equal dynamic dialogical model with multi-subject has the power to eliminate the traditional idea of binary opposition in translation study and break the logos centralism resulted by the unitary subjectivity.