On Translation Strategies Under The Influence Of Alternity

George Steiner puts forward in his book After Babel: Aspects of Language andTranslation the concept “alternity”, which refers to the capacity that man alwaysseeks to and is able to change the reality that is verbally created by his predecessorsand presented to him as a tangible truth with his own power of expression. Alternityconsists in “alteration”, and the process of translation also inevitably involves“alteration”—which mainly reveals itself in translation strategies the translatoruses—because no translation can be completely equivalent to its source text, andchanges will always exist. To find out if there is any significant relation between thetwo “alterations”, this thesis analyzed some of Yan Fu’s quintessential translationstrategies adopted in Tian Yan Lun, and found that these strategies can be well fittedinto the three phases of alternity, i.e. body, identity, and idea. However, it would betoo arbitrary to come to the conclusion that translation strategies adopted in Tian YanLun result from Yan Fu’s alternity only with textual analysis, for alternity is not justproduced by one’s subjectivity but also influenced and conditioned by the social andcultural milieu one lives in and one’s course of life. Hence, this thesis first viewedYan Fu’s alternity from this perspective, and then added in textual analysis. Arelatively objective conclusion was then derived from the combination of the twoperspectives. With information within and without the text, this thesis found thattranslation strategies are in fact the direct expression of the translator’s alternity,which, however, is hardly observable in normal translations as alternations aremostly too tiny to be seen in them.