Translator’s Subjectivity In Literary Translation

A study of the translation history shows that traditional scholars have always focused on such issues as translation standards, strategies and methods, and so on in the traditional cultural structure. In addition, they are also likely to look at the quality of translation and the competence of the translator from the perspective of "faithfulness" and "equivalence" and their judgments are based solely on faithfulness to the original text. Traditional theories in China and Western countries take the meaning of the original text as sacred and unchangeable and due to the certainty and objectivity of meaning, the original text can be fully understood and thus completely transferred into another language. Therefore, translators have been considered to play such unimportant roles as the servant, matchmaker, mouthpiece and translation machine. Only when the translators are faithful to the original and abandon their presence in the translation process can they succeed in translation. In other words, the translators have long been neglected and marginalized. However, in fact, translation is a process in which the translator mediates between the original author and the target language reader.In recent decades, as more and more disciplines are involved in translation studies, the perspectives and research dimensions of translation studies have been greatly extended. Since the1970s, with the emergence of the "cultural turn" in translation studies in the Western translation field,"translator" and "translator’s subjectivity" have gradually gained attention. In China, scholars began to study the "translator’s subjectivity" in the1990s and published a series of books and articles to discuss such issues as "creative treason" and "subjectivity" However, in these studies, although the connotation and manifestations of the translator’s subjectivity have been analyzed from different perspectives, the two characteristics of translator’s subjectivity,"faithfulness" and "treason", are either separated or considered as contradictory to each other. Such being the case, on the basis of modern translation theories, this paper intends to analyze translator’s subjectivity, its manifestations and the degree of subjectivity the translator should exert in the translating process. It concludes that the translator’s subjectivity is inevitable in translation, and "faithfulness" and "treason", as two manifestations of the translator’s subjectivity, form a dialectical unity. Therefore, the translator should exert his subjectivity in an appropriate degree to ensure success in translation.In literary translation, the translator should not satisfy with the conveyance of the meaning alone, but instead, he should enable the reader to feel what is beyond the language used, which includes the writing style of the author, the background and culture against which the work is produced, and the aesthetic beauty encoded in the original text. All these pose challenges to the translator. The translator as an individual with unique ways of thinking will inevitably incorporate his own characteristics into the translating process. Moreover, his linguistic competence and cultural background will also affect the translating process unconsciously. Therefore, the translator, however excellent he is, cannot completely remove his own subjectivity. Therefore, he should exert his subjectivity appropriately when he translates. Faced with two totally different languages and cultures, the translator has to make a choice between faithfulness and treason, appropriate translation strategies and methods. It is in this process that the translator exerts his subjectivity to the utmost.