The Translator's Subjectivity In The Translation Of Wei Cheng From The Hermeneutic Perspective

The translator is an important participant in the construction of national cultures.The translator plays an irreplaceable role in exchanges between different languages and different cultures.However, whether in China or in the West,the subjectivity of the translator was obscured at the very beginning.For a long time, translation theorists paid much attention to translation methods,standards,principles and the original text and so on, and thus the great contribution of translators was neglected.With the "Cultural Turn"in translation studies,proper attention has been given to the study of the translator's subjectivity, and the study in this aspect gradually deepens.The marginalized status of the translator has been gradually changed and the subjectivity of the translator has been brought to attention.Hermeneutics,a methodological theory related to understanding, interpretation and application, can be traced to a long, long time ago. Schleiermacher, Dilthey, George Steiner and the two contemporary ontological philosophers Heidegger and Gadamer and so on have contributed a lot to hermeneutics'development.Hermeneutics recognizes the translator's active interpretation about the original text.As the subject of cognition, the interpreter is an active creator of the meaning instead of a passive recipient of it.Ch'ien Chung-shu's Wei Cheng has great artistic and literary value, whose humorous and sarcastic style, and various kinds of figures of speech have attracted a great number of readers.Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics includes three principles which are the historicity of understanding,the "fusion of horizons"and effective history. Two principles of them—the historicity of understanding and the"fusion of horizons",are employed in this thesis to analyze the English version of Wei Cheng translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao so as to reveal the subjectivity of the translator. Generally speaking, the historicity of understanding gives rise to prejudice of understanding including misreading.People are historical existences and have their own historical particularities and limitedness,so misreadings that occurred during the translation process are inevitable.Understanding means the superposition of all past horizons of the text and the present horizon of the subject. During the understanding process,two horizons overlap and attain the "fusion of horizons",which makes cultural filtration unavoidable.This kind of filtration phenomenon can be proved easily from image filtration, content filtration and form filtration.The subjectivity of the translator is embodied in both misreading and cultural filtration.