On Translator’s Subjectivity From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

With the advent and burgeoning of the "cultural turn" in translation theories and the deep-going study of translation, the status of translator is gradually improving. Translator as the subject of the translation activity plays a more and more important role. The exploration of translators’ position and its role in the process of translating is always the eternal topic of translation studies. As a translation theory appearing in the post-modern context, eco-translatology explains translation process from a new perspective and it is the model of attaching great attention to translator. Therefore, the study of translator’s subjectivity from the perspective of eco-translatology is of important research value and is a relatively new attempt.This thesis attempts to explore how translator’s subjectivity is embodied in eco-translatology. Through the studies on translator’s subjectivity abroad and at home, the connotations and features of translator’s subjectivity can be summarized as four aspects: initiative; creativity; purposiveness; passivity. Through the explorations on eco-translatology, the whole translation process can be divided into three processes:pre-translating process; translating process; after-translating process. And translator’s adaptive selection and selective adaptation to the translational eco-environment runs through the whole translation process. This thesis selects and analyzes two English versions of Lun Yu in order to further explore the manifestations, connotations and features of translator’s subjectivity under eco-translatology. The first version is Thus Spoke the Master by Xu Yuanchong; The second version is Confucius-The Analects by D. C. Lau. In order to verify the manifestations of translator’s subjectivity under eco-translatology, the author explores how two translators exert their subjectivity and how two English version of Lun Yu embody translator’s subjectivity.Through analyzing, it can be deduced that translator’s creativity is mainly manifested in the translating process. Xu Yuanchong and D. C. Lau creatively adopt different translation strategies to interpret the source text in different degrees. Xu Yuanchong mainly uses free translation and foreignization in order to make the target readers understand easily. He focuses more on the reproducing of main points and formal beauty. However, D. C. Lau pays more attention on conveying the original style so he mainly adopts domestication strategy in translation. Translator’s creativity is mainly manifested in the transformations from linguistic dimension (lexical level, syntactic level, stylistic level), cultural dimension (core value concepts, idioms and allusions) and communicative dimension (addition, changes of the content). Xu Yuanchong and D. C. Lau fully exert their subjectivity respectively and produce two different versions; Translator’s initiative and purposiveness is mainly embodied in the adaptation and selection to the internal need; Translator’s passivity is mainly embodied in the restrictions from the external need, and in the evaluation and selection from the translational eco-environment.