A Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Death Of A Salesman----from The Perspective Of Hermeneutics

Translator is the subject of translation. In the course of translation, the translator’s understanding and description of the original text would turn out to be different because of the influence of his cultural background, personal experience and his own values. With the appearance of "cultural turn" of translation studies, translation studies had gradually moved from focusing on the faithfulness to the original text and began to pay more and more attention to translation’s subjectivityHermeneutics is a science about understanding and interpreting. It provides a new vision to translation studies. The development of hermeneutics experienced three periods: ancient hermeneutics, methodological hermeneutics and ontological hermeneutics. George Steiner firstly applied hermeneutics to translation and developed translation hermeneutics. At the same time, he proposed four stages in translation:initial trust, aggression, incorporation and compensation, in each of which the translation’s subjectivity is manifested.Different cultural backgrounds, experiences, social positions, and other ideologies of the translator’s will lead to the various interpretations, different structures and expressions to produce different effect in the translation. In light of hermeneutic theory, this thesis carries out studies on two Chinese versions of Death of a Salesman by analyzing the two versions to present the differences caused by translator’s subjectivity throughout translation activities and to conclude which one is more appropriate in translating drama.Death of a Salesman is one of the most successful dramas by the American dramatist Arthur Miller. It was brought to stage and screen repeatedly and is a reserved repertoire. The two versions studied in the thesis were respectively translated by the famous translator and dramatist Ying Ruocheng and Yao Ke. Living in different times and social environment, they translated the same text differently. The detailed analysis of the two Chinese translations is done in this thesis to prove the manifestation of translator’s subjectivity in translation.This thesis has shown that due to the different living and social environment, there are many differences in the two versions. In the choice of translation strategies, Ying prefers domestication while Yao prefers foreignization which can be seen through their translation of character’s names, the figures of speech, idioms and the cultural-loaded phrases. With different translation strategies come different translations. Ying’s translation focuses more on the performability of the drama and its language is more plain, colloquial and idiomatic. Taking the responsibility of introducing western culture to china, Yao adopted foreignization strategy and remained differences of cultures in his translation which reduced its performability. In translating the Brooklyn dialect of the source text, both translators chose Peking dialect to replace it. But the results differ largely. Yao used a lot of dialects which are difficult to understand. Maybe it is because the Peking dialect has changed a lot for these years.Through a comparative study on the two Chinese versions, this paper aims to present the different manifestation of translator’s subjectivity during translation process in light of George Steiner’s four-fold translation theory and tries to tell which one is better in translating drama. At the same time, the author wrote the paper with the purpose to attract attention on the two Chinese version of Death of a Salesman.