Recasting The Translator's Decision-making Process

On the basis of the essential of theories of intertextuality, this thesis starts to make clear the notion of "literary intertexts", and then explores at length the necessity and possibility to employ an intertextual dimension to guide the translation of literary intertexts before finally recasting the translator's decision-making process in correspondence with various constraints brought about by the complexity of literary intertexts.Theories of intertextuality unanimously hold that no text can be detached from other texts and the meaning of the text is in relation to other texts which it alludes to, takes up, and generally transforms. However, intertextuality is by no means a static property of texts due to the unavoidable incorporation of cultural connotations and knowledge structures. Upon that, the thesis ventures to establish the term "literary intertexts", a combination of features of common literary texts and that of intertexts. In so doing, the translator's decision-making is not so much a process that can be finalized through a linear linguistic replacement of a reference in the source text by one in the target text than a comprehensive consideration of both macro- and micro-text processing.To introduce an intertextual dimension means harmonizing or balancing the competing ground of the source-orientedness and the target-orientedness. The necessity to apply such an intertextual dimension could be explained partly by the efforts to offset the polarized tendency of two frequently-mentioned dimensions and partly by the fundamental characteristics of intertextuality at work in translation procedure. An intertextual dimension has to take into account three layers of perspectives: word-in-text, text-in-situation and translation-in-system. And the possibility to do so is fulfilled on the part of the translator as a reader-re (writer) or a decision-maker.As far as the translation of literary intertexts is concerned, the translator's decision-making process starts with how the translator figures out the intertextual and contextual meanings, the textual function and the communicative purpose of the source text with resort to hermeneutic principles and scenes-and-frames semantics. What follows is a significant stage when the translator consciously and restrainedly wields his intersubjectivity to arrive at a synthetical combination of operations responding to said constraints on text processing. Illuminated by the notion that translation is a norm-governed activity, this thesis continues to re-evaluate translation strategies contributed by Hatim and Mason in order to pave the way for the application of Snell-Hornby's integrated approach, namely, the gestalt approach, the top-down approach and the scenes-and-frames approach, to the translation of literary intertexts. At last, such an approach will be substantiated by a case study on three translations of two intertexts in the opening paragraph of The Deer and The Cauldron.