A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Lolita:From The Perspective Of Gadamer's Hermeneutics

Lolita, as the representative work of the modern famous Russian American writer Vladimir Nabokov, is honored as “one of the best novels in the 20 th century” and regarded as the masterpiece of the postmodernist writing. This novel tells us an abnormal love story between a middle-aged man Humbert, who chooses to settle in America from Europe and an American young girl Lolita. Since Lolita was first published more than 50 years ago, it has been translated and published in many countries and the relevant research about it has become more and more systematic. The translation of Lolita in mainland China began in the late 1980 s and the early 1990 s and more than 20 versions of this novel have come off the press so far. Consequently, the research about the Chines versions of Lolita is of great significance.In this thesis, the writer tries to conduct a comparative study between two Chinese versions of Lolita— the version of Yu Xiaodan and the version of Zhu Wan, based on three core concepts in Gadamer's hermeneutics: the historicity of understanding, the fusion of horizons and the effective history, mainly discussing the effects of such elements as misreading, culture filtering, the translation strategies, and the ideology in the translation process of Lolita as well as the reasons of different versions of this novel. According to Gadamer, both the subject and object of the understanding are historical. Prejudice is the precondition and basis in the process of understanding. What's more, due to the historicity of understanding, the interpreter and the text have their own horizons, so the essence of translation is the fusion of horizons between the interpreter and the text.The first part of this thesis has a brief introduction to Gadamer's hermeneutics and the previous studies of Lolita; the second part emphases on three core concepts of Gadamer's hermeneutics; the third part, the two Chinese versions of Lolita is compared and analyzed using Gadamer's hermeneutics. The conclusion is drawn through comparison: different interpreters at different time have different interpretations of the same text and Gadamer's hermeneutics provides a new research approach to this phenomenon.