A Hermeneutical Study Of The Translator's Subjectivity

In the traditional translation studies, the translator was always put in an invisible place and his function in the process of translation was also neglected because of the author-centered and source-text centered translation theories. In the 1980s, the cultural turn in translation theories bring a new light to translation studies and the translator's subjectivity has become one of the hot issues concerned by western and Chinese translation communities. Hermeneutics is a discipline about understanding and interpretation. There is an intrinsic relationship between Hermeneutics and translation studies. The concepts of"historicality","fusion of horizon"and"effective history"in Hermeneutics embody its stress on subjectivity. Translation studies from the perspective of Hermeneutics no longer adhere to the traditional translation principle of"determinative author"or pursuit the"standard"translation, but begin to recognize the reality of historicality existing in any interpreter and the interpreter's active role in the process of translation.Gulliver's Travels, the Irish writer Jonathan Swift's masterpiece, is liked by many readers all over the world. In China, it was translated for dozens of times by different translators since the first time it had been introduced to China. This thesis selects and analyzes three of these translation versions; they are Lin Shu & Wei Yi's Hai Wai Xuan Qu Lu pulished in the late Qing Dynasty, Yang Haocheng's Ge Lie Fu You Ji published in the 1990s, and Wang Weidong's Ge Lie Fu You Ji translated at the beginning of the 21st century, and all of them are good representatives of their times. Different backgrounds of these translation versions and the long intervals between them make them proper objects of Hermeneutical study of translator's subjectivity.By analyzing the three translation versions of Gulliver's Travels from the perspective of Hermeneutics, this thesis tries to explain the reasonableness of the phenomenon that the same work is translated differently in different historical conditions and illustrate the translator's important role in the process of translation.