On The Intersubjectivity Of Literary Translation

Literary translation has a very long history, and the study of which, developedwith practice, has continued for hundreds of years and yielded rich results. However,traditional literary translation studies are characterized by the principles of dualism,instrumentalism and perfectionism, resulting in the inferior positions of the translatorand TT. Recent literary translation studies have successfully brought the translator tothe fore with his/her subjectivity being greatly swelled and finally been trapped in thetwilight of subjectivity, thus necessitating an intersubjective turn and makingintersubjectivity one of the hottest topics in current literary translation studies. Thisthesis is a tentative study of the intersubjectivity of literary translation, including itsdefinitions, manifestations and implications for meaning construction, in the hope ofrevealing the true nature of literary translation.This paper starts from a literature review of current studies on translationsubjectivity and intersubjectivity and takes the related intersubjective theories inWestern philosophy as its theoretical basis. After establishing the translator, ST andTT as subjects and defining the intersubjectivity of literary translation as theinterrelatedness and interactions between the subjects, it goes on to examine howintersubjectivity manifest itself in the process of literary translation, including theintersubjective nature of ST and TT, the dialogic relations and interactions betweensubjects in the process of literary translation. As meaning is always a core issue forany translation and especially controversial in literary translation, this paper devotes achapter to study meaning construction from an intersubjective perspective.Finally, this paper comes to the understandings that: 1. literary translation isintrinsically intersubjective. ST and TT as literary works possess the active andinitiative features of subjects and thus must also be treated as the subjects of literarytranslation. Thus the relations between ST, TT and translator are that ofsubject-subject rather than object-subject, which is a great challenge to the traditionalhierarchized dualism. 2. The interactions among the subjects of literary translation are very complicated, which is a result of the specialty of the subjects and theircross-temporal and spatial encounter. However a dialogic relation can always bedetached in their cognitive and spiritual interactions. 3 From an intersubjectiveperspective, meaning in literary translation is not something that is inherent and fixedin ST that can be faithfully transferred by the translator into TT or subject to thetranslator's manipulation. Instead, it is a dynamic construction through theinteractions of the subjects and appears as the result of fusing intersubjectivehorizons.