A Study Of The Chinese Translation Of The Secret Garden In Light Of Hermeneutic Translation Theory

Since the May Fourth Movement, there has been increasingly more translation and introduction of foreign children’s literature into China while the academic research on it is inadequate, which is a pity for the translation studies. Therefore, this research adopts the Chinese version of The Secret Garden which is prominent among the foreign children’s literature as the research corpus. The Secret Garden is a works of children’s literary written by Frances Burnett, a British writer. As one of the most heavyweight classical children’s literature in the 1900s and a works worthy of spread and handing down, it has been translated into Chinese by different translators such as Zhang Runfang, Li Wenjun, Bao Huinan, and Xu Hong, etc. So far, most of the researches on The Secret Garden have been conducted in light of feminism while the research on the Chinese versions of The Secret Garden is scarce.Based on George Steiner’s hermeneutic translation motion, this thesis attempts to carry out a study of Li Wenjun’s version of The Secret Garden on both linguistic and cultural levels. In view of the special target readers of The Secret Garden, the language features of the children’s literature should be pre-analyzed by the translator before translating it. The process conforms to George Steiner’s hermeneutic translation motion, namely trust, aggression, incorporation and compensation, which emphasizes the translator’s subjectivity. George Steiner’s hermeneutic translation motion stresses that the translator trusts the novel, invades the original text, incorporates the useful information on linguistic and cultural levels and finally compensates the target text for the loss. Under Steiner’s translation motion, when translating the The Secret Garden, the translator can bring the subjective initiative into practice and get a version which the children are ready to understand and appreciate.In light of Steiner’s hermeneutic translation motion, after analyzing the Chinese version of The Secret Garden, the author has drawn the following conclusions:1. The author adopts two principles to reflect the language features of the children’s literature:emphasizing the educational function; making the translated version kid-friendly.2. Steiner’s hermeneutic translation motion is reflected in the Chinese version from both linguistic and cultural aspects.The research significance is as follows:the study verifies the guiding and explaining function of Steiner’s translation motion to the translation of children’s literature; through the research on the Chinese version of The Secret Garden, the author wishes that more scholars would pay attention to the translated versions of The Secret Garden and other works of children’s literature.