A Study On The Translation Of Children's Literature From The Perspective Of Gadamer's Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is a philosophical theory which became prevalent in the West in the 1960 s.It is used to explore the understanding and interpretation of textual meaning. The development of hermeneutics originated from ancient hermeneutics then gradually developed into methodological hermeneutics, ontological hermeneutics and philosophical hermeneutics.According to Gadamer's hermeneutics, literary translation was a kind of interpretation. It was embodied in the whole process of translation. He put forward the philosophical principles such as “historicity of understanding”, “fusion of horizon” and “effective history”, which provide neodoxy for translation study. The premise of interpretation is “understanding”,because any translation is based on the understanding and interpretation of the source text.Since understanding is affected by some factors such as historical background and traditional culture, it was historical from Gadamer's standpoint. The historicity of understanding causes the author of the source text and the interpreter to have their own “horizons”. The process of translation is actually the fusion of the author's horizon and the translator's horizon. When translators with their own horizons interpret and translate literary works at different period of times, they will obviously produce many different translated versions towards the same source text. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics has important guidance in literary translation.As a branch of literature, children's literature contains the common characteristics of literature and its own distinctive features. Translators not only need to take children's cognitive characteristics and reading habits into consideration, but also need to adopt a vivid and understandable language to express the meaning of original text. As a classic children's novel, Charlotte's Web is widely enjoyed by readers, especially children. This thesis makes a comparative study of the two Chinese versions from the three principles of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. The author analyzes from the following aspects: 1) how the influence of conscious misreading and unconscious misreading affects translators during the process of translation; 2) the reasons of differences between the two Chinese versions on the lexical level, rhetorical level and syntactic structure from fusion of horizon; 3) the effective history is analyzed according to the two translators' historical and cultural backgrounds.The result of the study shows that conscious misreading will compel translators with different historical conditions, personal experienced, cultural and educational backgrounds to not only fill in some indeterminacies and gaps of the original text but also to endow the text with new meaning to make it acceptable to the target readers. Unconscious misreading makes translators distort some meaning of the original text and produce totally different translations;Secondly, when translating literary works, translators should combine their ownunderstanding of the original text with the reading experience of the target language readers.Therefore, the process of translation involves not only the fusion of the translator's horizon and the author's horizon together, but also the fusion of the translator's horizon and the target readers' horizon. These three horizons can be fused at the same time; Thirdly, the differences in linguistic content, form and style between the translated versions of Kang Xin and Ren Rongrong provide a typical sample for translation study.This thesis applies Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics to the translation of children's literature to analyze the reasons why there are different versions towards the same source text,and discuss the guidance of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics in the translation of children's literature. Hopefully the thesis can provide a feasible way to the further study and serve as a reference to the translation of children's literature.