A Study On Translator’s Subjectivity In Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Of Red Sorghum From The Perspective Of The Hermeneutic Motion

Since the “culture turn” in the1980s, translation studies have gone through ashift from linguistics to culture and human being in the past decades, realizing aleap-forward development from focus on the object of translation to the subject.The translator plays an indispensable and irreplaceable role in the inter-lingual andinter-cultural communication. Under this circumstance, the studies on translator’ssubjectivity have been flowering. George Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion provides aperspective to study the translator’s subjectivity and the manifestation of thetranslator’s subjectivity in a concrete way. It subdivides the translation process intofour stages: trust; aggression; incorporation; and compensation. Each stage of theprocess highlights the subjective status of translator in translation. Within the theory,taking the Red Sorghum as the object, this thesis aims to study how the translator’ssubjectivity is exerted during the four stages of translation of Honggaoliangjiazu.The thesis first traces the foregoing studies on translator’s subjectivity at homeand abroad and the three changes of the Hermeneutics theory. By studying thecharacteristics of the source text Honggaoliangjiazu, Howard Goldblatt’s bilingualand bicultural competence, and also the acceptance psychology of the target readers,the author hopes to verify the practicability of the Hermeneutic Motion theory inthe process of translation. Besides, the thesis tries to make a research on the mainfactors which contribute to the success of Red Sorghum in western countries andMo Yan’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature. What’s more, the thesis tries tomake an analysis of the optimal translator model for the “going-out” of Chineseliterature. This thesis aims to study the translator’s subjectivity in HowardGoldblatt’s translation of Red Sorghum from the perspective of the HermeneuticMotion, which can be seen as a beneficial attempt in expanding the perspectives ofstudies on translator’s subjectivity and enriching the dimensions of research on Red Sorghum.