On The Construction Of The System Of Translatology

A clearly-defined and systematic structure of a discipline plays a crucial guiding role in the overall development of the discipline. The present dissertation exerts to build up such a macro structure of translatology. It is necessary that some basic questions should be answered before the constructing work begins, because whether the constructed structure is reasonable or not is largely dependent on whether such questions are settled or not.The independency of contemporary translation studies is decided by the developing tedency of the whole translation history and the necessary conditions which an independent discipline should have. Therefore, the author firstly proves that the forming of translatology as an independent discipline is a logical result of the translation history and meanwhile is a demand of contemparory translation practice.Although most of the present scholars of translation hold that translation studies can become an independent discipline, some fundamental theoretical problems in this immature discipline have not been resolved. The analysis of the position of translatology in the system of human knowledge given by different translation study schools and the dialectical research on translating and translatology shed light on our consideration of the position of translatology in that system. The nature of translating is that scientific character and artistic character are a dialectical unity and the nature of translatology is that scientific approach and artistic approach are a dialectical unity. The proportion of the two characters or that of the two approaches is different when different genres or texts are involved. In scientific and technological translating, the artistic character normally makes up a small portion. However, it is that subjective artistic creativity of human beings that plays a dominant role in the process of translating and concetratedly reveals the humanistic character of translating. This character of translating decides that the discipline which studies translating also has evident humanistic character. The author holds that translatology is an independent discipline, which does not subject to any other disciples such as linguistics or literary studies, and is a scientific discipline in the system of humanities (science of humanities).In order to build up a comprehensive and reasonable system structure of translatology, we should comply with some general principles and employ specificmethods──the principles of dialectical materialism and the unity of the methods ofprescription and description. Only by sticking to such principles and methods can we build up a stable and open translatology structure which objectively reveals the history and the present situation of translatology and which scientifically and dynamically adapts to and even forecasts the developing tendency of translatology.In the forth chapter of the dissertation, under the guidance of the upper principles and methods, the author firstly analyzes briefly some typical ideas of translatology constructing and some models of the structure of translatology, which are proposed by some distinguished translation theorists. Then, the author, by assimilating the positive ideas of other translation theorists analyzed in the previous part, constructs a macro structure of translatology which is composed of five parts: introduction, translation history studies, theories of translating, applied translatology and meta-theories of translatology. The dissertation further studies the branches of the structure of translatology, defines the major problems of each branch and offers the views of the author accordingly.