An Analysis Of Two Translations Of The Story Of My Life Under Hermeneutic Translation Theory

The thesis makes a research into the Chinese translations of Helen Keller’sautobiography The Story of My Life from George Steiner’s hermeneutic translationtheory. According to Steiner, this theory includes three concepts, understanding astranslation, possibility of translation, and the fourfold hermeneutic motionrespectively.“Understanding as translation” means that understanding is the processof translation. To understand a paragraph is not only to analyze its words andgrammar, but also to put it into the context and know its author’s writing style. As fortranslatability, Steiner believes that not everything can be translated and noteverything can be translated now. And no mater how many shortcomings translationmay have, it is still one of the most important and valuable work among all the affairsof the world. Besides, Steiner divides the process of translation into four concretesteps: trust, aggression, incorporation, and compensation. The translator, first of all,chooses a text and is sure that the text is meaningful and worth translating; thentranslation begins, sometimes in the face of hostility and resistance from the original,translator must be aggressive and engage in an approximately violent interpretationand translation. In the process of language transformation, translator has to digest andincorporate the cultures of the source language so as to re-appear the idea contents,aesthetic information and language style as well as to convey the implication of exoticcultures. Finally, translator makes compensation to restore the balance between thesource-text and the target language.The Story of My Life is an autobiography by Helen Keller about her early life. AsKeller’s debut, its publication shocked the American magazines and was entitled as anincomparable work in world literature. Except for its literature value, its instructionalmeaning is also significant. At present, the authoritative translations of The Story ofMy Life are few in number, among which Zhu Yuan’s and Li Hanzhao’s versions arethe outstanding ones. This thesis makes an analysis of the two versions by applyingSteiner’s hermeneutic translation theory. A lot of examples are given to focus onexplaining how the four steps are manifested in the two versions. The two translators’trust comes from their evaluation of the original text and their linguistic and cultural competence. Then they aggress into the text out of their pre-knowledge and culturalawareness so as to realize the incorporation of form and meaning. Finally they employall kinds of compensatory strategies to compensate the unavoidable loss brought bythe first three steps.Through the analysis of the two versions, it will be found that Zhu Yuan and LiHanzhao have brought out different translations of the same original work, eachhaving its own merits. Both can make readers accessible to the original writer.