A Comparative Study Of Translator’s Subjectivity In The Two English Versions Of The Scholars From The Perspective Of Hermeneutics

As the first Chinese satirical novel, The Scholars cannot be ignored in the history of Chinese classical literature. It is a long novel reflecting the life of the scholars. It describes the thoughts and behavior of various kinds of scholars, to expose and criticize the darkness and corruption of the feudal society. Lu Xun praises it as “castigating the errors of the times out of unselfish motives”, and it is the beginning of the Chinese satiric literature.Besides several versions of some given chapters, there is only one complete English version translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. So far, almost all of the studies about the English version of The Scholars have focused on this version. Most of the research are text-oriented, and focus on the translation strategy. However, few study centres on the translator and explores the translator’s subjectivity. At present, there is only one thesis discussing the importance of translator’s subjectivity of Yang’s translation written by Zhu Sijuan from Central South University in 2011 named Explication and Implication in C-E Translation from the Perspective of Translator’s subjectivity: A Case Study of Yang Xianyi’s Translation of The Scholars. She analyzes the explication and implication in Yang’s translation and proves that the translator’s subjectivity plays an important role in the process of translation. Because of the insufficiency of the research to the translator’s subjectivity in the translation of The Scholars, this thesis tires to contrastively analyze the translator’s subjectivity in the two English versions of the Yangs and Hsin-Chang Chang on the basis of the Steiner’s fourfold translation motion, thus to make a complement to the existing research.Hermeneutics is a theory of understanding and interpreting the meaning of text. It centered on transforming the text based on understanding and interpreting. In a similar way,the task of translator is to translate a language into another on the basis of understanding to the original text. Therefore, Hermeneutics provides a strong perspective for translation activities. George Steiner directly applies the Hermeneutics to translation. He puts forward that translation is a process of understanding of translator, and divides the process of translation into four steps named trust, aggression, incorporation and compensation. However,different translators have different understanding due to many factors, so they would adopt different translation strategy. Thus there exist differences in their translation.This thesis takes the Steiner’s fourfold translation motion as the theoretical guidance and compares the two English versions of The Scholars by the Yang Xianyi couple and H.C.Chang, so as to explore the manifestation of the translator’s subjectivity. According to the Steiner’s fourfold translation motion, firstly the trust of Yang Xianyi and H.C.Chang to the original text will be presented respectively from the factors of their translation purpose and their language competence; secondly the aggression of two translators will be discussed due to their different writing style and cultural consciousness; thirdly the incorporation of translators will be compared based on their adopting of different translation strategies and sentence patterns to transform the meaning and form of the text; at last, their compensation will be contrasted from their use of addition and annotation to the original text. By comparison, the Yang couple prefer to use short sentences and common words. They use comparatively simple sentences with few modifiers and add no excessive complement to the original. They try to use the method of literal translation and remain Chinese culture on the basis of faithfulness to the original text. Their version is simple and easy to understand.However, H.C.Chang aims at rendering his all understanding to the original text and reproduces the tone and inner emotion of the characters. Therefore, Mr. Chang likely to use free translation and conveys more details and the implication of the original. He likes to use long and complex words and sentences with many modifiers. He adds many words to show the implication of the characters and expresses the feeling of the characters directly and obviously. The two translators’ writing style, culture consciousness, living environment,understanding of the original and translation purpose all influence their selection of translation strategy. It can be seen that the translator’s subjectivity is manifested throughout the whole process and plays a decisive role in translation. Hermeneutics emphasizes that“understanding as translation”, translation is a process of fully understanding to the original.The meaning of literary works is infinite, each translator has his own understanding and their understanding is not complete. Translations of different translators to the same text can constantly deepen the understanding and the meaning of the original text.