A Comparative Study Of Chinese Translations Of Sherlock Holmes: A Perspective Of Hermeneutic Translation

This thesis analyzes translation differences caused by translators’ subjectivity andsocial background by taking George Steiner’s Hermeneutic motion as the theoretical basisand two Chinese versions of Sherlock Holmes as the study cases.Steiner believed translation means understanding, and proposed four steps oftranslation:“trust”,“aggression”,“incorporation” and “compensation”. These fourfoldsspecify the process of understanding, and give an explanation of two basic translationquestions “why” and “how”. The first step is to trust the source text and the translated textwould be meaningful, and answer the question of why people translate that text. The nextthree steps tell us how to translate. Firstly, with their own knowledge structures, translatorsaggress the source text and disassemble the messages that they get. Then they reproducethem according to their own understandings. The last but not least, they would compensateto achieve equivalence between the source text and the target text.This thesis compares the Chinese version of Sherlock Holmes1896and the version of1981within the framework of the Hermeneutic Motion, and analyzes different reasonswhich decided different Chinese versions of Sherlock Holmes. It firstly states the trust oftranslators, which is driven by social background. Different social backgrounds fosterdifferent translation aims. The next three steps solve the problem of how they are translated.Through an analysis of style and content choice, it works out the reasons for differentversions. Naturalization is adopted in the early version representing messages in Chinesetraditional form. A large number of foreign works introduced into China since May4thMovement, translation of them have influenced the Chinese language gradually so thattranslators prefer to retain the language form when they translate plot. Therefore, the later translation is more faithful to the source text compared with the early translation.The combination of the translators’ personal knowledge with the social backgroundcauses differences between the two translated versions. It is argued that translation is adiachronic activity so that social-cultural background is indispensable to translationevaluation. And retranslation of classical works is meaningful to some extent.