Translator’s Subjectivity In Two English Versions Of Shui Hu Zhuan

For centuries, translation study concentrates on the issue of “how to translate and how to translate well,” and translator’s inferior position has been widely accepted by literature and translation field. Thanks to the cultural turn in different social facets, culture study shift its attention to the factors caused the cultural phenomena instead of phenomena itself. Translation study follow suit. Traditional “match maker” “servant” has been replaced by “leading role” in translation activity. Along with promotion of translator’s status, a new study scope is opened: “translator’s subjectivity” study. However, there are two great problems in recent translator’s subjectivity study: most of these studied concentrates on encouraging translator’s creativity in a overdue manner, which lead to exaggeration of translator’s subjectivity; then they miss the duality feature of translator’s subjectivity: creativity and restrictive factors.Based on previous studies on translator’s subjectivity, this paper argues that translation activity calls for exertion of translator’s subjectivity. Also, it demonstrates the interaction of translator’s subjectivity and the criterion “faithfulness”.This study make a comparative study on two English versions of Shui Hu Zhuan: Pearl S.Buck’s All Men Are Brothers and Sidney Shapiro’s Outlaw of the Marsh. The author classified language items in Shui Hu Zhuan into four kinds: nickname, appellation, vulgar language, and idiom. Study methods involve comparison, text analysis, statistics. This paper demonstrates the study from three aspects: 1 two translator’s translation methods to fulfill their translation purposes. 2 the influences of Pear S. Buck’s overplaying her subjectivity on target text. 3 the relationship between translator’s subjectivity and the criterion “faithfulness”.After close text analysis, the author find that in order to maintain Chinese culture and language style, Pearl mainly adopted literal translation, transliteration, explanation and omission translation method. While Shapiro combined literal translation and liberal translation together to convey Chinese culture in a way western readers can understand. Then Pearl’s overplay of her subjectivity lead to unfaithful cases of translation: cultural distortion, culture loss, obscure and awkward language style. Finally, Making translation faithful to the source text and culture is translator’s imperial task. In the process of creating a faithful work calls for translator to employ their subjectivity. translator can manipulate translation better by dealing with the relationship between translator’s subjectivity and “faithfulness” criterion.