On Translator’s Subjectivity In The English Version Of Sheng Si Pi Lao From The Perspective Of Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion

Translators’ subjectivity has long been neglected in the previous translation studies dominated by the structuralism linguistics. It was not until the 1970 s, when there was a “cultural turn” springing in translation studies that translators’ subjectivity began to draw more and more attention from the translation studies scholars and an increasing number of researches began to focus on translator’s role in translation process.Hermeneutics is a kind of theory that highlights the understanding and interpretation of the meaning of a text. Some prominent theorists such as Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer all made their contributions to the formation and development of early hermeneutics. Based on the findings of the above-mentioned scholars, George Steiner put forward the concept that “understanding is translation” and pointed out that the translator must experience four stages in translation process, namely trust, aggression, incorporation and compensation. Steiner’s hermeneutic theory of translation has provided a new perspective for translation studies and especially for the study of translators’ subjectivity.The author of this thesis chooses the English version of Sheng Si Pi Lao written by Mo Yan as a case study. Adopting George Steiner’s Hermeneutic motion as her theoretical framework, the author intends to analyze Goldblatt’s translation strategies in terms of culture and language, for the purposes of finding out how Goldblatt conducted his subjectivity in the translation process.Through her analyses, the author finds that in the translation process, Howard Goldblatt employed different translation strategies, such as rewriting and domesticating, literal translation plus annotation, omission and so on when translating some specific culture-loaded words or sentence structures in Chinese. Sometimes, when the forms of source language are vacant in target language, he chose to develop his subjectivity to convey the main information of the source text by changing the way of expression. He realized his objectives and successfully restored the balance between source text and target text by means of his compensation. Goldblatt’s subjectivity is thus fully embodied in his diverse translation strategies.