| This thesis attempts to investigate translators' subjectivity in literary translation according to hermeneutics and the Aesthetic theory of reception.Hermeneutics is a term which, in its broadest sense, describes the interpretation of meanings - explication, analysis, commentary. The first stage of its development is textual hermeneutics. The second stage is Romanticist Hermeneutics. These two stages are regarded as the traditional hermeneutics. The third stage is modern hermeneutics. Hedegger and Gadamer are representations of it. They insist on the historicity and temporality of interpretation and stress a great influence on hermeneutics. In Heidegger's point of view, it's the translator who acts as the interpreter in an interpretation. In Gadamer's point of view, interpretation of any text should be categorized into the time system, thus, there is no absolutely objective understanding of a text. For Gadamer, past and present are firmly connected and the past is not something that has to be painfully regained in each present.For them, meaning is always codetermined. An inescapable relativity and indeterminacy is thereby introduced into the notion of interpretation. The translators have certain freedom to re-create, thus, there may emerge different versions to a single original text.The Horizon of Expectations and the Fusion of Horizon are two main principles of the aesthetics reception theory. The Horizon of Expectations refers to the range of values - aesthetic, economic, moral, religious, social, symbolic, etc. ~ a given audience anticipates it will encounter in an artwork. The work functions either by meeting those expectations or by challenging them. The reader is not a passive receiver but an active participant in interpretation. Due to the following two reasons, different readers attain different understandings, interpretations and evaluations of the very same text. The first reason is that the different readers belong in different age, historical and cultural backgrounds as well as readers' political and economic status, life experience and understanding of and taste in literature. The second reason is that only with the time going by can the implied meaning of an artwork be obtained gradually and completely. The Fusion of Horizon means that one intends to understand the text itself, to fuse hishorizons with the author's. This means that the interpreter's own thoughts too have gone into re-awakening the text's meaning. In this the interpreter's own horizon is decisive, yet not as a personal standpoint that he maintains or enforces, but more as an opinion and a possibility that one brings into play and puts at risk, and that helps to truly make one's own what the text says.Jauss, the representative of modern Aesthetic theory of reception, holds that the value of a literary work is revealed under read. The position and value of a text varies with different receptional senses in different periods of time. In the course of writing, a writer must take readers' "horizon of expectation" into consideration. The readers do not obtain the total meaning of a text until the achievement of "a fusion of horizons" between the text and the reader.From what mentioned above, to a translator, the writer of the original does not exist any more after he/she finishes the text, which enables him to interpret the text in his own way. Thus, the nature of a literary translation is the process of a translator's active interpretation.Translators' subjectivity actually refers to their interpretative activity during their translation. Translators' subjectivity can be expressed in the following ways: 1). In choosing an original text subjectively. 2). The active participation in his interpretation to a text because of the presupposition existed in a translator. Furthermore, the thesis argues some manipulation factors such as special social history, ideology, ethics etc. that constrain a translator's subjectivity.To examine the translators' subjectivity, the thesis applies a case study of the two Chinese v... |
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