A Hermeneutic Perspective To Literary Translation Study

As an ancient and yet young academic discipline, hermeneutics has, in its long history, evolved from special hermeneutics to universal hermeneutics and then to philosophical hermeneutics. In the last century, hermeneutics renewedly found its rejuvenation in the realm of humanities. On the one hand, the close relationship between philosophical hermeneutics and translation is beyond any doubt, on the other hand, literary translation is always paid more attention due to its particular literariness and complexity, therefore, it is indubitable to widen the field of literary translation study by means of introducing philosophical hermeneutics into it. Closely revolving around the proposition of "translating is a process of understanding and interpreting", this thesis, firstly, reviews on some foundational theories of modern hermeneutics, and points out the inevitable relationship between hermeneutics and literary translation. From the perspective of modern hermeneutics, literary text is a dialectic unity of openness and closeness, consequently, literary translation has an inherent feature of interpreting, as well as a limited interpreting. The process of literary translation is that of hermeneutic motion, which is always influenced by fore-understanding of the subjects of translation and the factor of historical attribute. So to speak, it is absolutely impossible to realize a complete objective interpretation. In addition, with the propose of providing a new perspective to the literary translation practice, the author makes a comparative study on the various understandings of different translators on the three Chinese versions of an English poem The Isles of Greece, which are all the best representatives of their times, and accordingly further elucidates the theory of hermeneutic literary translation. In recent years, the study on literary translation in light of hermeneutic theory has become more and more important in western translation circle, but on the contrary, that of domestic translation study is inferior by comparison, so that it is significant for domestic scholars to construct a system of Chinese translation theory by using the foreign splendid research productions for reference. Furthermore, a hermeneutic perspective to literary translation study not only breaks through the traditional model of literary translation criticism with the multi-perspectives, but also experiences a fire-new attempt of inter-disciplinary view on translation studies.