The Translator's Understanding In Translation: A Hermeneutic Perspective

In the light of philosophical hermeneutics, this thesis focuses on the translator's understanding stage in translation for its research"object". Understanding is foundational for the translator's whole work, so the nature and characteristics of understanding are not only uneliminatable but will show themselves in the final version of translation as well. The translator's understanding is historical. Therefore, in a sense, the final translation is a kind of the translator's prejudices.Hermeneutics boasts of a long history in the West. The ancient hermeneutics was applied to explaining the Gods'words. When it came to the Middle Ages, hermeneutics meant exegesis, taking the Bible as its explanative task. Then creaming off Schleiermacher's, Dilthey's, Heidegger's, and others'efforts, Gadamer developed the subject and made it a philosophical concern. As Palmer (1969) said:"Hermeneutics is the study of understanding, especially the task of understanding texts."(p.8) In this sense, hermeneutics is in nature closely linked with translation. By applying the concept of hermeneutic understanding to the translator's understanding stage of the original text, we may get some insights into the translation problems. Understanding is preconditioned by the translator's horizon, which delineates the range of vision he is able to reach. Moreover, he can only start understanding from his horizon, in which he forms his prejudices of the coming meaning. In connection with his horizon, the translator evolves his expectations of the original text. These expectations are validated or nullified by his following encounter with the text. This process is progressed in the hermeneutic circle in that the part is always determined by the whole, and vice versa. Then, when the translator's perceptions are all harmonized in every detail, this circle is realized and he gets his understanding of the text. This harmony is called fusion of horizons in hermeneutic terms. Therefore, the translator's understanding is always branded with a personality.The translator's understanding of the original text is historical. This means, on the one hand, the SL text would not get a forever-settled understanding. On the other hand, each translator necessarily and legitimately has his own understanding of the original, for we live in our inescapable horizon. Hence comes the effect because of the historical understanding, i.e. the SL text should have its different interpretations in different ages.This kind-of personal understanding, however, is not without some boundary. Firstly, it is delimited by the fixed form of the original text. Though the text, with all its indeterminate points and gaps that need filling, is open to interpretations, its language symbols are set there. The translator must work inside this outline. Secondly, the translator's work is controlled by the public horizon of the TL context. Therefore, the translation is a dialectic complex of the translator's free and confined result of understanding.Finally, citing the exemplary translations of the same classical Chinese poems by Ezra Pound and Xu Yuanchong, the thesis identifies these different translations with their respective translators'horizons. Thus to some extent, we get support for our previous assumptions. The reason we choose classical Chinese poetry as instances is that they are more apparent and crucial on the understanding aspect of translating, which is determined by the characteristics of the Chinese language and by the particular form and way of meaning expression of the classical poems. Furthermore, Pound's and Xu's translations of classical Chinese poetry are both characteristic and influential in their respective times. Thus these two versions can be typical examples, which may stand for many other successful translations in expounding the paper's point. But confined by the length of the thesisand the author's personal competence, the examples cited are limited into a certain kind. Further future-discussions over a greater application of philosophic hermeneutics to translation are needed. The thesis thus is only a tentative study of the application of hermeneutics to translation within the author's hermeneutic situation and her historical prejudices.