Translator’s Subjectivity In The Story Of The Stone By David Hawkes From The Perspective Of Co-cultural Theory

The Story of the Stone, which is called the encyclopedia of Chinese feudal society, is always considered as the highlight of Chinese classical novels. Describing every aspects of Chinese culture, it has great achievement in its literature and ideology. Since The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes coming into being, the book attracts many readers and scholars all over the world. This paper studies the translator’s subjectivity shown in The Story of the Stone from the perspective of co-cultural theory, aiming to find how a translator with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds manifests his subjectivity while translating a foreign work into his own language. Furthermore, this paper can make a contribution to studying how translator’s subjectivity affects the dissemination of translations.First of all, this paper makes a brief introduction about the different versions of The Story of the Stone, and point out that one basic feature in David Hawkes’ version is that he considers the book as being from his mother tongue.Secondly, the research of this paper introduces translator’s subjectivity and co-cultural theory. With the help of these two theories, this paper finds that the influential factors in co-cultural theory are coincident with those in translator’s subjectivity, and keep manifested in the translation. All these factors enrich the cultural meanings of translator’s subjectivityLast, this paper studies in detail how the six influential factors function in Hawkes’ The Story of the Stone, to affect his choosing of strategies and make his version be a successful model in cross-cultural communication.Undoubtedly, when we study translator’s subjectivity from the perspective of co-cultural theory, we will enlarge the object of study of the co-cultural theory from spoken language to written one, and pay more attention to the cultural turning in translations. The manifestation of translator’s subjectivity not only shows the translator’s initiative and creativity while translating a work, but also actively helps to disseminate translations abroad.