A Study Of The Translator’s Subjectivity Manifested In The English Translation Of Camel Xiangzi From The Perspective Of Hermeneutic Motion Theory

Translation researchers have tended to focus on linguistic equivalence for a long time,but since the "culture turn"that occurred in the 1970s,the translator has gained more visibility and the topic of translator’s subjectivity has received extensive study accordingly.This thesis selects Shi Xiaojing’s English translation of Lao She’s Luotuo Xiangzi as the object of study and places it under the guiding framework of George Steiner’s fourfold hermeneutic motion theory.Much effort has been exerted to study some of the representative examples from the English translation.The aim is to illustrate how the translator exerted her subjectivity in translating the novel.The research finds out that Shi Xiaojing exhibited the translator’s subjectivity in line with the fourfold hermeneutic act.In the step of initial trust,the translator accepted the translation task and believed that the novel was worth translating.Moreover,she could take advantage of the opportunity to correct the mistranslations made by a former translator.In the step of aggression,the translator interpreted or understood the source text at both the linguistic and cultural levels based on her great command of English and Chinese and profound cultural knowledge.In the step of incorporation,the translator flexibly employed the strategies of literal translation and free translation to express the form and meaning of the source text.She also had to make a choice between retaining and replacing the unique cultural imagery in the source language culture,so that target readers could understand the translation more smoothly.In the step of compensation,the translator made up for the balance lost such as information deficiency during the previous steps by deleting unnecessary redundancy and adding extra explanations.In conclusion,each of the four steps above embodies the exertion of translator’s subjectivity.This thesis has enriched relevant studies on translator’s subjectivity in literary translation,and the findings are expected to promote the global spread of Chinese culture.