The Translator's Subjectivity Revealed In Translations Of Tao Te Ching From The Perspective Of Hermeneutics

As one of the Chinese classics, Tao Te Ching attracts a great number of Western as well as Chinese scholars to interpret it in a new way. As a result, in the West, the translations of Tao Te Ching are only next to that of the Bible in number, and now there exist more than one hundred English translations of it in the world. When translating this Chinese classic, different translators will often have their own interpretations of it and adopt different translating strategies, fully displaying their subjectivity, as there are numerous original texts and annotations of Tao Te Ching, with its obscure and difficult language, deep and profound thoughts. Also the language and culture in China differ greatly from those in the West.In the history of translation, the translator's subjectivity has undergone a process of from being obscured to being recognized. According to traditional translation theory, the translator is usually in an indecisive as well as dispensable position in the translating process, and the significance of the translator's subjectivity in literary translation has usually been neglected. In the 1990s, the translation studies officially took the "cultural turn". With this development, the subjective role that the translator plays in translation is increasingly attached importance to, and the translator's subjectivity has since been accepted and recognized. As one of the important theoretical bases of the translator's subjectivity, hermeneutics provides a new perspective for translation studies, not only broadening the range of translation studies, but also enabling people to have a correct understanding of the translator. Hermeneutics can be defined as the science of the understanding and interpretation of meaning, with its central horizon lying in people's understanding and interpreting activities concerning the text. And the translating activity is also concerned with the understanding of the original text, so hermeneutics is closely related to translation. Theoretically speaking, hermeneutics confirms translator's active interpretation of the original text. As a cognitive subject, the translator is not a passive recipient of meaning but an active and creative agent in the making of meaning. Unavoidably, the translator will input his own aesthetic values, beliefs, life experience, cultural characteristics and attitude in the interpreting process of texts, and the translation, to some extent, will mirror the translator's mental outlook and his idiosyncratic features. Prejudice, historical understanding and horizon fusion are the three most important concepts of Gadamer's hermeneutics, and the deep understanding and analysis of them are helpful to the study of the translator's subjectivity.The English translations of Tao Te Ching keep coming forth, but the researches into these translations remain fewer in number. Thus the research on the translator's subjectivity of the translations of Tao Te Ching from the perspective of hermeneutics is a kind of tentative while meaningful work. And in this thesis, four selected English versions of Tao Te Ching are compared. Through the analysis of the choice of the original text and commentaries, the way of dealing with the linguistic as well as the cultural elements, and the application of different translating strategies such as whether to keep the original style or not, the thesis draws the conclusion that the translator's subjectivity has been displayed in the translations of Tao Te Ching.