On Translator's Subjectivity

As translation studies turned their attention to cultural problems, the translator's subjectivity has been focused on gradually by translation scholars at home and abroad and thus become one of the hot issues in the translation study field. This thesis treats the issue as the topic under discussion. Based on the previous research regarding or related to this issue, this thesis begins with defining the concepts of the subject and translator's subjectivity, and then reveals its necessity and inevitable display. After that, how the translator's subjectivity came up to be a heated-discussed issue is focused on in the dissertation, and by the way, chief discussions on the issue by scholars at home and abroad are systematized roughly.However, any argumentation focusing on any topic has to be built on some theoretical foundation and the translator's subjectivity is no exception. In the author's opinion, each one theory is more or less deficient when used to serve this purpose. For this reason, Gadamer's hermeneutics and German functionalist approaches are combined as the foundation in the article to analyze the translator's subjectivity thoroughly.On this basis, the thesis summarizes the main elements embodying the translator's limited subjectivity, understanding the source text, producing the target text by language transformation, choosing the to-be-translated text and adding the preface etc. Then, the focus of the dissertation turns to the phenomenon of retranslation related to the translator's subjectivity. It is pointed out afterwards that the subjectivity canalmost be seen everywhere in translated texts and that the translator attempts to put his or her subjectivity into full play to compensate the deficiency of the translation activity itself. Nevertheless, it can not result in the perfectness of translated texts, which leads to regret and beauty existing in translation. In the end, the thesis explores the proper application of the subjectivity, and it is a point that a translator is liable to approach but not to reach or to go beyond, which thus create many difficulties for translators. With this as a conclusion, the discussion on the translator's subjectivity comes to an end.