A Study On The Translator’s Subjectivity In The English Version Of Shui Hu Zhuan From The Perspective Of The Postcolonial Theory

Traditional translation theory pays more attention to the transformation between textsand neglects the influence of historical, social, cultural and political factors to translation.Postcolonial translation theory occurred in the1980s and it was more concerned with unequalpower relation’s influence on translators and versions which concealed translation.Postcolonial translation theory brings political factors into translation, which provides a newperspective for translation studies.Under the background of cultural globalization, cultural turn of translation studies makestranslators’ status visible and more and more scholars begin to study the subjectivity oftranslators. Translators become the most important factor in the process of translation.Translators have to develop subjective initiative in order to achieve their translation goals, atthe same time, translators’ subjectivity can also reflect on the choice of original texts andtranslation strategies. But the developing of subjective initiative is restricted by somesubjective and objective factors.The most representative translators who translated Shui Huzhuan in English were PearlBuck and Shapiro Sidney. Pearl Buck devotes her life to the communication of eastern andwestern cultures. She has a special emotion to China and has double cultural identity. Her lifeexperiences make her sympathize Chinese people deeply and she is the first person whointroduces English version of Shui Huzhuan to the west. Shapiro Sidney loves Chinese culture.And he has begun to translate Chinese literature since1949. He devotes his most life to thespreading of eastern and western culture. He and Buck have the same life experience and theymake an important contribution to the communication between eastern and western cultures.This thesis analyzes manifestation’s pattern of translator’s subjectivity under specificsocial and cultural background on the basis of Buck and Shapiro’s versions of Shui Huzhuan.Two translators develop subjective initiative properly on the premise of being loyal to originaltext in order to achieve translation goals and analyze how they reflect their subjectivity in theprocess of translation under the influence of power difference. As to the choice of translation,Buck mainly uses foreignization and Shapiro mainly uses domestication, but we can seehybridity in the two English versions.This thesis discusses translator’s subjectivity through textual analysis from thepostcolonial perspective to explain postcolonial theory applied in the translation of literature, expecting to perfect postcolonial theory’s application in translation and make a contribution tothe cultural communication between east and west.