The Translator's Style In Literary Translation

Ever since Horace in his The Art of Poetry first raised the notion of "faithfulness", translation scholars, pre-linguistic and linguistic alike, echoed it as the only legitimate criterion of translation. A review of the literary translation practice, however, defies the idealized translation criterion, which plays down the dynamic and initiative role of the translator in the process of transformation. "Faithfulness" as a translation criterion is generally acknowledged in translation theory, but not universally followed in translation practice. The dissertation is not intended to propagate or belittle the phenomenon, but to disclose the translator's visibility as an undeniable entity in literary translation along the dimension of the translating procedures, i.e. the translator's choice of the source text (shortened as ST below), the translator's reading of the ST, the translator's translating strategies and the translator's rendering of the ST in the target language.The dissertation is different from the previous research in this field in the following respects. First, more emphasis is shifted to the neglected area, i.e. the translator's choice of the ST, the starting point for the success of a translation. The point is made clear, through logical argumentation and case study, that the translator's choice of the ST reflects either the translator's aesthetic reception of the ST or his individual thinking on translation as a well-motivated translator. Second, the author criticizes the cultural approach to the translating strategy, which takes everything under the swing of the cultural studies and questions the functional approach to the translator's status in the translating process. In the last chapter, the Translator's Rendering of the ST, the dissertation attaches importance to the objective factors at work behind the phenomenon, namely, language differences and socio-linguistic aspects of translation activity. To this end, some key concepts are introduced which include "dialect" and "idiolect".