A Study Of Translators' Subjectivity: An Approach To Translation As Adaptation And Selection

Translator is the most active but most easily neglected factor in translation. It was the "cultural turn" that brought the translator and his subjectivity to the scholars' research scope. This thesis applies Professor Hu Gengshen's approach to translation as adaptation and selection to the studies on translators' subjectivity and points out that, in response to the translational eco-environment, translators' subjectivity is manifested through translators' multi-dimensional adaptations and adaptive selections.Translators' subjectivity is a heated issue in present translation studies. Initiative is the first thing that arouses scholars' attention. Though many translation theories emphasized translators' power in translation, they might have the danger to magnify translators' manipulation to an extreme. Later, discussions began to recognize the restrains of other elements on translators' subjectivity. However, too much emphasis on the restrains seems to make our studies shift away from our original intention. Though there have already appeared a large amount of articles and discussions about translators' subjectivity, we still lack a systematic study on translators' subjectivity.Professor Hu Gengshen tried to build a translation theory with the translator as the center. He regarded translation as "a selection activity of the translator's adaptation to fit the translational eco-environment" (Hu Gengshen, 2004, p. 220-221). He explained the process of translation in terms of the Darwinian principle of natural selection, and highlighted adaptation and selection as aspects of translational activities. The adaptive selections revealing translators' initiatives and their active adaptations in response to the restrains of the translational eco-environment hopefully add new dimensions to the studies of translators' subjectivities. By applying Professor Hu Gengshen's approach to our studies of translators' subjectivity, we find that the translation process is the translational eco-environment's selections of the translator and the target text at the macro-level. From the translator's angle, his subjectivity is actually manifested by his adaptations to the external and internal needs in the choice of the source text and multi-dimensional adaptations and adaptive selections in the reconstruction process.The thesis will take Lin Yutang's translation of Fu Sheng Liu Ji for example to analyze his subjectivity in Six Chapters of a Floating Life from the perspective of translation as adaptation and selection. The reason that we choose this translation version to study is that the version fits the translation eco-environment. It is considered as a successful translation, which gets high praises and is loved by the readers. Furthermore, the translator enjoys great reputations in translation and has formed his own translation principles. It is safe for us to say that both the version and the translator successfully survive in the translational eco-environment. And the large amount of information about Lin Yutang's life, works and thoughts on translation could help us to better understand his adaptations and selections when he was translating Fu Sheng Liu Ji.This thesis is significant at least in the following two aspects: 1) the discussion of translators' subjectivity within the framework of the approach to translation as adaptation and selection provides us with a new angle to the study of translators' subjectivity; 2) the analysis of Lin Yutang's subjectivity in Six Chapters of a Floating Life proves that translators' subjectivity could be well explained from the perspective of translators' adaptation and selection in the translation process.