A Study On Chinese Translation Of Philological Elements In The Lord Of The Rings From The Perspective Of Hermeneutic Motion

The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy novel written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien,a philologist with a professional area on Germanic Philology,including Old English and Middle English.Philologists study historical forms of a language or languages and also of related languages.Tolkien integrates his knowledge about philology into creating The Lord of the Rings.Allan Turner summarizes the language units related to philology in The Lord of the Rings,and names them philological elements,including:(1)Names of people and places;(2)Words invented by Tolkien but presented as English;(3)Invented languages and their representation in an English text;(4)Words considered archaic or used in an older sense;(5)Syntactic structures considered archaic;(6)Proverbs and verses as examples of pre-modern genres;and(7)Avoidance of language specific to the modern period.The first three groups show the differences of languages in the novel in terms of space,while the rest four groups present the differences of languages in terms of time.Allan Turner has discussed translation strategies and possible compensatory devices when philological elements are translated into Germanic and Romance languages which are closely related to English,while this study intends to discuss the Chinese translation of philological elements in The lord of the Rings as a whole and compare with Allan Turner's findings.This study applies Hermeneutic Motion theory and the methods of text analysis and document analysis to solve three questions:(1)What translation strategies and possible compensation measures are applied when translating philological elements in The Lord of the Rings into Chinese?(2)To what extent can the effects of philological elements in The Lord of the Rings be transferred into the Chinese translation of LotR?(3)What are the differences in terms of translation strategies and compensation measures when translating philological elements into Chinese and six western languages respectively?Through analyzing the source texts and Chinese target texts of philological elements in The Lord of the Rings,chapter four and chapter five of this study first apply Hermeneutic Motion theory to analyze domestication or foreignization strategies and compensation measures taken by Chinese translators to solve the first research question.Then this study combines related documents to analyze the effects of philological elements in the Chinese target text to compare with their effects in the source text,thus answering the second research question.Finally,chapter six of this study compares findings from solving the first and second research questions with Allan Turner's findings,which is to analyze the differences in terms of translation strategies and compensation measures taken by Chinese translators and translators from western languages.And this study finds out that when the philological elements are translated into Chinese and Germanic and Romance languages,different translators from different languages choose different translation strategies largely because the distances between target languages and English are different,thus the familiar or alien effects of philological elements in the source text cannot be completely transferred into all these target texts,and the translation losses are inevitable.Even in rare cases where translators from different languages apply same translation strategies,the familiar and alien effects of philological elements in different target texts of different languages are still different from each other.This study will help Chinese readers and translators understand philological elements and their effects in The Lord of the Rings and may provide references for the re-translation of The Lord of the Rings or translations of Tolkien's other works;on the other hand,through discussing Chinese translation of philological elements,this study hopes to inspire researchers to explore more topics to discuss Chinese translation of The Lord of the Rings;finally this study hopes to provide references for studies on Chinese translations of archaising texts in general.