A Study Of Prejudice And Translator’s Individuality In Translation

Prejudice theory has experienced a tortuous long journey since the sixteenthcentury. And the attitude towards prejudice in academic field changed from totallynegative to objective. During the development of prejudice theory, Hans-GeorgGadamer inherited and developed Heidegger’s fore-structure theory and formulated anew concept of prejudice. In his view, prejudice is no longer the same as thetraditional hermeneutics which is defined as the obstacles in the process ofunderstanding and expressing, and the understanding and expressing of translatingprocess are dependent on the prejudices of translators. Different prejudices result invarious understanding and expressing during the translating process and that cannotbe avoided. At the same time, a translator’s individuality changes along with differentprejudices. A translators’ prejudice is not only affected by the external factors such as,historical background, customs and religious belief, but also by the internal factorssuch as gender and translators’ purpose. The various prejudices also impact translatorsof choosing translating strategies in the process of understanding and expressing.As the first literary work to explore human sexuality, the novel LadyChatterley’s Lover plays a significant role in Chinese literature. For a long time, thescholars both at home and broad have focused on translating this novel. Thedifferences among those translated versions are not only because of the choice oftranslating strategies (foreignization and domestication), but also because of theirprejudices. The thesis aims at a comparative study of two complete Chinese versions from the perspective of prejudice. The two Chinese versions were translated at twodifferent times, between them, the historical backgrounds, customs, regions andgenders of the translators vary considerably. All the factors provide the feasibility fora comparison of the two versions from the perspective of prejudice theory.