Translator's Subjectivity And The Choice Of Translation Strategy

Although translation as a kind of activity has existed for more than thousands of years, the study on the subject of translation–the translator, didn't begin until 1970s. From then on, the issue of translator's subjectivity started to attract the eyeballs of more and more scholars. In fact, translator's subjectivity objectively consists in the process of translation and is manifested by the choice of different translation strategy due to different individual characteristics and different motivation of the translator, which is perfectly illustrated by the two English complete versions of Hong Lou Meng.Hong Lou Meng is a walking encyclopedia of Chinese culture. It is so culture-loaded that it is challenging for those who want to translate it from Chinese to English. In 1970s, two complete English versions were published almost at the same time respectively in Beijing and London. One was translated by Chinese scholar Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang; the other was rendered by British sinologist David.Hawkes. The two versions are so different in style that once brought out, they immediately became the study target of translation theorists.Concerning the strategy of translation, Ys mainly adopted foreignization to spread the Chinese culture to English readers and Hawkes mainly adopted domestication to make what he translated more readable. So, Ys'version is more faithful to the original but it is a little bit obscure to the readers; H's version is smooth and fluent but sometimes the meaning of the source text is distorted and lost.Actually, foreignization and domestication co-exist in each translation. A case in point is the English versions of Hong Lou Meng by Ys and Hawkes. In a word, there is no absolute foreignization and domestication. We should treat them objectively and dialectically.