An Analysis On The Translator's Subjectivity-A Comparative Study Of The Chinese Versions Of "Sense And Sensibility"

In the literary translation,the translator plays a very important role.He is a communicator between the original writer and the target text reader.In the several thousand years of translation activity,the translator's status was not invariable.In the Roman times he was considered as a "conqueror".And later on,he was crowned as a 'servant','invisible man' and some other subordinate,because the traditional translation theories,which were source-text oriented,put much emphasis on the study of the language and paid much attention to the equivalence and faithfulness in terms of the language,thinking of translation as a mechanical word transformation.Thus,in order to faithfully put across the writer's intention, most of the translators made efforts to avoid their subjectivity when translating.In fact,translation is a dynamic and complex process in which there are many factors involved.The translator,in time sequence,works as the reader and the interpreter of the source text,and then as the writer of the target text,will unavoidably add something subjective in his/her translation.And this specific translation process is an essential part where the subjectivity of the translator is obviously manifested.Since the 1980s,with the advent of culture turn in the translation field,the translator's status has been promoted with the translation theories beginning to acknowledge the creativity of the translator and the significance of his subjectivity. And in China,more and more scholars are carrying out the study of the translator's role,function and the subjectivity.Jane Austen,a British writer in the late eighteenth century,boasts a world wide and everlasting recognition in the field of English literature.And her masterpieces attract many Chinese readers and translators to read and translate. Her works are so profound that they leave much room for the readers to imagine. As is known to us,the novel Sense and Sensibility well recognized in China has several Chinese versions,and they are quite different from each other as each translator has his/her own education background,social background,language capability,aesthetics,and so on.And Sun Zhili's and Wang Jiqing's are the two very popular,so the thesis made a comparative study on them to explore how the translator's subjectivity is displayed in translation.Based on a comparison made between the two Chinese versions of Sense and Sensibility,the thesis aims to make an analysis on the subjectivity of a translator. In the comparison that is carried out from the perspective of translation style, conveying of meaning and rendering of typical characters in the novel,we can see that there is,for each translator,an item of subjectivity that functions and works in the translation process.It is due to the fact that each translator has his/her own subjectivity when translating that their products are,for sure,different from each other even though they deal with the same work.The thesis points out that the translator's subjectivity mainly lies in the translation attitudes,and the translation strategies that each translator applies in translation and the bilingual capability that each owns.