Translator's Subjectivity From The Perspective Of "Habitus"

The translator plays an indispensable role in translation activities. However, in the traditional translation studies in pursuit of the translation regulations universally applicable, he or she has for a long time been put into a shadowy position. Thanks to the "Cultural Turn" rising in the 1970s and 1980s, the translation studies has strode from the micro linguistic level to the macro cultural context, thus pioneering spaces for the examinations on the cultural and social factors of translation, and then providing theoretical support for the studies on the translator. As a result, the translator's subjective role in the translation process has been greatly recognized and even highlighted. Thereafter, the topic of translator's subjectivity has been put forward, which has widely attracted the attention of translation studies. Nevertheless, an examination on the previous researches into translator's subjectivity reveals that there are more issues necessarily to be explored and studied one or more steps further, one of which is the subjective passivity factor of translator's subjectivity."Habitus" is the term central to the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher. Bourdieu borrowed and re-elaborated this Latin word and endowed it with the dual characteristics of both being structured and structuring, in the attempt to resolve, from the dimension of the practice, the antinomy of the Subjectivism and Objectivism existing in the human sciences and philosophical traditions. As a structured system of dispositions, the habitus is acquired by the agents as a response to the life experiences and social conditions they encounter; as a structuring structure, the habitus, once comes into being, will inevitably guide all the thoughts, perceptions and the practices of the agents'.The present thesis reviews firstly the translator's marginalized role in the traditional translation theories and the achievements obtained and the limitations found in the studies on translator's subjectivity after the "Cultural Turn". On this basis, it then makes an attempt to introduce the concept of "habitus" to the studies of translator's subjectivity by educing the theoretical hypothesis: the exertion of the translator's subjectivities is inevitably influenced by his or her habitus except the objective factors such as the different linguistic and cultural systems and the translation norms in which the translator is involved. To testify it, a case study is conducted through an investigation and analysis on Lu Xun's translation choices between 1909 and 1927 to confirm that his unique inclinations in the choices of the source texts such as the literary works from the "weak and minor nations" of the Eastern Europe, the fairy tales and the foreign literature theories and his selection of literal translation owed to a great extent to his habitus. Accordingly, the thesis draws the following conclusion: as a subjective passivity factor influencing the exertion of the translator's subjectivities, "habitus" thus becomes an element for the study of translator's subjectivity, and the introduction of "habitus" to this topic will make it even further and more comprehensive.