The Nature Of Literary Translation Viewed From The Angle Of Hermeneutics And The Aesthetics Of Reception

The Nature of Literary Translation Viewed from the Angle of Hermeneutics and the Aesthetics of ReceptionAbstractThere exists an intrinsic relationship between hermeneutics and the aesthetics of reception on the one side and the literary translating studies on the other, in which we will find that the former two academic fields overlap with the literary translating studies in a remarkable way in terms of the objects and scope they deal with. And in addition, we find that a large amount of translating practice and a great number of translation probes, both at home and abroad, have already demonstrated that the three research fields can be closely related.Hermeneutics and the aesthetics of reception are the two most influential schools of literary theories in the West. Of them, however, hermeneutics is not such a school that produces merely one academic viewpoint Instead, it has at least two tendencies which stand in opposition to each other. One is represented by H.G. Gadamer who, with his emphasis on the link between the text and the reader as a major part of the chain of "author-text-reader", has attached much importance to the openness of text and the active role of a reader in the reading process, arguing that the reader's interpretation of the text can and should surpass the author's intended meanings. In contrast, E.E. Hirsch, the representative of the other tendency, has a preference for the stress laid on the link between the author and the text, and on the exclusive correctness of interpreting the given text. He has attached importance to the text's objectivity and its decisive role in the meaning generation. H. R. Jauss and W. Iser are two leading scholars in the aesthetics of reception. They also speak favorably for the stress on the text's openness and the importance of the role of the reader's participation in reading, so much so that they regard the reader's reception as an underlying factor of the text's literary evolution in its meaning and as the text's innate driving force.This thesis attempts to make a careful examination of the conception and features of the text in the light of dialectical materialism, pointing out that (1) the literary text refers to the existence of a literary work before being read by a reader; and (2) the literary text is both determinate and indeterminate, both closed and open; or to put it more concretely, the text has a determinate and closed circle within which each of its components is indeterminate and open; namely, the openness and indeterminateness of the text are limited in its closed and determinate circle. The literary text, therefore, is a dialectical unity of determinateness and indeterminateness, closedness and openness in the evolution of literature.In view of the above-stated basic features of text and in combination with the relevant knowledge of communicative theory, this thesis is an attempt to discuss the nature of literary translation. The discussion will focus on the following aspects:(1) the features of the literary translation. This thesis points out that the literary translation, in itsnature, is a process of aesthetical re-creation which is basically completed through the translator's interpretation. The interpretation is the soul of the literary translation. The whole process of translation (in its narrow sense) consists of the two procedures of information reception and information release. By saying that the translation is the interpretation, we mean that the translation as a whole is the interpretation. This is embodied in the following two facts: (A) the interpretation pervades the whole translation process, for both procedures of information reception and information release are completed through the translator's interpretation. The main differences between the interpretation in the first procedure and that in the second one lie in that the former is the basis of the latter while the latter is the concretization and fixation of the former; the former is multidimentional and multidirectional while the latter, for a spe...