A Study Of Translators' Subjectivity From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

Translation practice is a process involving the birth of a piece of art. Translators play a crucial role in the translation process. The emergence and development of translation aesthetics allow us to gain a better understanding of translators' translation activities in the aesthetic process of translation. Translation is a recreation of the original text. Translators,as readers of the original text, firstly read the original text, appreciate and understand the beauty of it, and then act as the main subjects of language to represent the beauty of the original text in the translated text. However, it is not easy to recreate and reconstruct the original beauty. Therefore, in translation practice, how to exercise translators' subjectivity appropriately to recreate the original beauty from the perspective of translation aesthetics becomes an issue worthy to be explored.Charlotte's Web, as a literary novel, due to its substantial content, beautiful form,profound theme, has been translated into a variety of languages. Even it has several versions in the same language, for example, there are four popular Chinese versions of Charlotte's Web, showing different translators' subjectivity in the process of translation and attempting to reproduce the original beauty in different ways. Therefore, with the translation aesthetic theory as the basic framework and Charlotte's Web as the studying case, this thesis makes a discussion on how translators exercise their subjectivity on the following two systems: the formal system and the non-formal system of aesthetic objects.The formal system involves elements at the phonetic level, lexical level and syntactic level,and the non-formal system includes images and ideorealm. This thesis mainly answers the following three questions:1. In the process of Chinese translation of children's literature,how does the translators' subjectivity act on the aesthetic objects of translation aesthetics in order to convey the original beauty, that is to say, how is translators' subjectivity embodied in these two systems: formal aesthetic system and non-formal aesthetic system?2. What are the factors that affect translators' subjectivity in the translation of children's literature from the perspective of translation aesthetics?3. What is the relationship between translators' subjectivity and translation aesthetics?This research takes Chinese translation collection of children's literature as the research object. The examples analyzed in this thesis are selected from materials with aesthetic values in the two Chinese versions of Charlotte's Web. This thesis organizes relevant literature and attempts to analyze the three questions mentioned above through text analysis method and comparative analysis method.Through a study of the translated versions of Charlotte's Web, this thesis probes into the manifestation of the translators' subjectivity in its two different translations and summarizes the subjective factors that influence the text output in literary translation from the perspective of translation aesthetics. Translators' subjectivity is reflected in the selection of translation strategies, the employment of language, translators' culture and aesthetic levels,etc. The factors affecting translators' subjectivity mainly include translators' aesthetic ideals, their aesthetic understandings of the source text, aesthetic sensations,translation purposes,expected target readers and translators' bilingual abilities,etc. Meanwhile, the relationship between translators' subjectivity and translation aesthetics stands to be re-creative and re-explored. The beauty in the original text is waiting to be recognized and recreated in the target text. The recreation of the original text is regarded as a production of a piece of art. Translators are given the chance to play their subjectivity and creativity by digging out the aesthetic elements in the original text in various ways.