From Subjectivity To Intersubjectivity

With the Cultural Turn and the Translator's Turn in translation studies, the long-neglected translator has gradually gained the due attention. Translation is such a complicated process that we can not turn a blind eye to the most active participant involved, namely the translator, who plays a very important role in the translating process, during which the translator makes various decisions. In this dynamic process, the translator is the translating subject, and his subjectivity can not be denied.This paper will focus on the study of translator-subject, especially the translator's subjectivity. Translator is termed as the translating subject for it is the translator who DOES the translation. In the long history of human civilization, translator has experienced so much, from being invisible to being visible. There has been quite a lot of discussion on the translator and his subjectivity recently. What is the translator's subjectivity? I come up with my understanding of the translator's subjectivity as "passive" one and the "active" one. By "passive", I mean that the translator tries to overcome some difficulties brought by the pragmatic constraints, while, by "active", I mean that the translation serves to realize the translator's cultural agenda or political agenda. Examples, like the literary translation in the late Qing Dynasty and the feminist translation practice, will be given to support my argument.Is the translator the only subject involved in the translating process? To answer this question, I first deconstruct and then reconstruct the translating process, so as to prove that the translating process is "a communicative process which takes place within a social context" (Hatim 2001:3). Through several rough graphs, this paper tries to find, besides the translator-subject, other subjects involved in the translating process. The discovery of other subjects involved is ofgreat significance, for it is conducive to a better understanding of the relationship between the translator-subject and other subjects involved. Then, the paper goes to detail the inter-subjective relationship among these subjects involved in literary translation, and such relationship can be well understood through their dialogue, which serves to be the means for mutual understanding or fusion of horizons in hermeneutic term among these subjects involved. Then, what does dialogue mean here? The paper answers this question by resorting to Bahktin's dialogism. Furthermore, the paper studies in detail what the dialogues among these subjects concerned cover, namely the cultural conflicts, ideological conflicts, and ethical conflicts.Through the descriptive study, this paper tries to justify the translator's subjectivity, clarify the translating process and the subjects involved, and verify the intersubjective relationship among these subjects involved in the literary translation, for all these efforts will be conducive to our understanding of the translator-centered literary translation.