An Analysis Of Translators' Subjectivity In Two Chinese Translations Of The Scarlet Letter From The Perspective Of Construal Theory

With the cultural turn in the 1970 s in western translation studies,translator's subjectivity has become a hot issue.Various linguists and translators gradually brought new perspectives to the translation studies.A large number of schools in translation studies including Deconstruction School,Hermeneutics Theory started to explore the establishment of translators' subjectivity in the process of translation and the relationship between translators and history,society and culture.They started to analyze and rethink as well as relocate translators' subjectivity in the process of translation,and that provides a basic foundation for the study of translators' subjectivity.Ronald Langacker,the founder of cognitive grammar,brings construal theory in linguistics for the first time.Construal mainly refers to people's ability to observe and demonstrate the same situation in different ways,including four dimensions: the degree of specificity when observing things,different scope and background knowledge,the selection of different perspectives and highlighting different prominence.Construal theory is closely correlated with the realization of translators' subjectivity in translation activities.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,the essence of translators' subjectivity refers to the different dimensions translators adopt to illustrate the same objects and scenes.Construal theory can provide guidance for translators to play their subjective role effectively in the process of translation.Therefore,it is necessary to apply construal theory to analyze the specific application of translators' subjectivity in translation activities.This thesis,based on construal theory put forward by Langacker,makes an intensive and comprehensive analysis of how people's construal affects two translators' subjectivity in their translations of The Scarlet Letter.Different translators have different construal facing the same situation.Then,the linguistic expressions translators use will be different from each other in the aspects of specificity,scope andbackground,prominence as well as perspective which will produce different translated versions.This thesis aims to make an intensive analysis of the concrete realization of translators' subjectivity in the aspect of linguistic expressions and syntactic features in the two Chinese versions of The Scarlet Letter from the angle of these four construal dimensions which provides a solid foundation for further studies.