Herbert Allen Giles' Rendition Of LiaoZhai Tales

The LiaoZhai Tales is praised as one of the best Chinese fictions in classical Chinese language, which has been translated into many other languages due to their thematic and artistic achievements. Among the three major English version, the translation of Herbert Allen Giles issued Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio is the earliest, most complete and most characteristic one.This thesis is an analysis of Herbert Allen Giles's rendition of LiaoZhai from the perspective of the translator's subjectivity. Over the years, Giles' version was always blamed for its innovations and changes in translation. Recently, with the emergence of new approaches to translation studies, the translator's subjectivity was gradually brought into light and gain increasing attention among translation theorists, which just can be applied to justify the unfaithful parts in Giles' rendition. Basing on the fourfold hermeneutic translation motion theory put forward by George Steiner, the thesis analyzes Giles' version of LiaoZhai from the four concrete steps of "trust", "aggression", "incorporation", and "compensation" , aiming at obtaining scientific cognition on how Giles' subjective consciousness exerted influence on his translated version and proving that Giles displayed his subjectivity to the utmost extent in thefour vertical translation steps.The thesis also makes a comparative study between Giles' rendition and Yang Xianyi's version. The research on the translator's different attitudes in "naming the whole book and the selected stories", "understanding and translating the original text" and " dealing with 'Yi Shi Shi Yue ' (异史氏曰') " testifies the ubiquitous influence of the translator's subjectivity. Through comparison we can see the way that the translator's subjectivity is applied to produce the totally different version to the same text, thereby affirming the success and achievement of Giles' translation of LiaoZhai.Based on what have been discussed above, we may conclude that all these unfaithful translations are out of Giles' personal subjectivity including his capability, experience, knowledge, personality and so on, which can have significant influence on his translation. Factually, it is the fully exertion of his subjectivity that lead to the prevalence of Giles' version of LiaoZhai when English-speaking people are totally ignorant of the Chinese culture and literature. The research findings show that, Giles' version of LiaoZhai is more available to diffuse Chinese culture, ideology and custom and preserve the exotic flavor of the original text at that time. His version enjoys a high reputation for integrating a wide range of culture and knowledge about ancient china with simple and straightforward English.Therefore, the author draws the conclusion that the exertion of the translator's subjectivity determines a translation work's merits and demerits. That is to say, successful translations are never independent of the translator's subjectivity and that often when the translator takes himself as a creator of the target text instead of an imitator of the source text can his translation achieve success. As a matter of fact, the success of Giles's version is embodied in his exertion of the translator's subjectivity.