Translation And Empathy:the Construction Of The Translatorial Subjectivity From The Perspective Of Communism

This dissertation aims at an exploration of the construction of translatorial subjectivity from the insightproposed in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that sees man as an end in his ideal freedom andempathy(Einfühlung) as the basic requirement of translation. A survey of the history of translation theory,however, could tell us clearly that there has been a lack of concern of empathy in translation studies, andtherefore there is much to be desired in the making of the subjectivity. It is then inevitable to get into thetwo and their relations.This paper, taking the above-mentioned topic as its thesis, is divided into five chapters.Chapter One,"Introduction," begins with an introduction to the motivation for choosing the topic ofthe construction of communist translatorial subjectivity, and goes on to review the current literaturerelevant at home and abroad. With the previous studies analyzed and the deficiencies of them brought tolight, the focus and the presumable innovative points of the present study are proposed. In addition, theobjective of the dissertation, the methodology and procedure of the study and the organization of the thesisare laid down.Chapter Two,"Means, why always the means?", probes into the history of western translation theoriesand reveals the fact that there is a parallel between it and that of the idea of utopia in the West, as embodiedin the legend of the translation of Septuagint. That is to say, western translation theories ranging fromCicero to St. Jerome, Dryden, Tytler and finally to Nida has been immersed in Utopian visions until"deconstructionism" comes to the stage in1960s, making a demarcation line. While the Utopian translationtheorists center on an ideal model, a stable correspondence or equivalence between the SL and TL texts,their anti-Utopian counterparts such as Derrida and Venuti challenge the established assumption ofauthorial meaning and claim that without the stable original meaning there is no perfect translation andthere is no need for it. If the Utopian theorists have ignored the translatorial subjectivity, theanti-Utopianists would take it as an issue but lean towards language. Both of the two may not have seentranslators as an end in the light of the view of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. What is more, sticking to reason, they have almost completely put aside the important element of humanity--empathy.Therefore, a question arises, what can be done after "deconstruction"?Chapter Three,"The end, how to reach the end?", opens with a discussion of the thesis of "theindeterminacy of translation" advanced by W. V. Quine in an attempt to answer the question raised above.Quine is chosen as a case typical of the "post-constructional" theorists, for as the other anti-Utopiantheorists, he also attacks the transcendental and unitary meaning. But the problem is, also going along thesame line as they do, he himself has slid into a depiction of the one-man-show of the translator, and thoughthe recognition and reflection of the problem later leads him to a turn to empathy, yet the issues concerningtranslation and translatorial subjectivity remain unsolved, probably because of some misconception. Hence,the history of empathy, the "feeling-into" of a new experience under the guidance of the other, is traced,with a detailed analysis of theoretical view of the concept proposed by the German philosopher Stein. Thischapter finally ends with a discussion of the application of empathy as seen in the experiences of variousChinese translators, indicating its historical necessity and usefulness both in practice and theory, especiallyin the construing of the translatorial subjectivity.Chapter Four,"Subjectivity and the process of translating," furthering the topic, tries to put emphasison the identification of the translator in the process of translating with the life-power in the original text,which can be led to the character within the artistic world, the lyric persona in a poem or the narrator in astory, a speaker of a sentence, or even the flow of a discourse itself, in relation to the context. The chapteralso reveals that the process can be divided into three stages: the seeking for the feeling in the original, thedwelling in it and finally the representation of it. If the first step is to define what is to be identified, and thesecond to keep it in the process, the third would mean a remaking of it in the version. Examples, taken fromtranslations of Mark Twain, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng (<红楼梦>) andDerrida, are used to illustrate the point. This chapter also calls Ricoueur to question from the perspective ofempathy.Chapter Five,"Conclusion," brings the whole dissertation to a close by summarizing the findings ofthe paper, and the main ideas of its author. It also points out the shortcomings of the paper, and thepossibilities of a further study the thesis may lead to, as seen in the overlapping of empathy and gantong (感通), a Confucianist concept, in their implication, a new direction which takes the Chinese thought as aninspiring power in translation theory.