A Study Of The English Translation Process Of Jie Mi From The Perspective Of George Steiner's Hermeneutic Theory

Jie Mi is the first novel of the contemporary Chinese novelist and screenwriter Mai Jia.It mainly tells the story of a mathematical genius,Rong Jinzhen,who devotes his life to code-breaking.The novel has become an espionage classic with its unique narrative style,novel storyline as well as its plain and beautiful language.Co-translated by sinologists Milburn and Payne,its English version,Decoded: A Novel,was published on March 18,2014.The English version achieves great success and attracts the attention of the academic circle.In the 1970 s,George Steiner explored the relationship between understanding and translation on the basis of the hermeneutic concept of understanding.In his book,After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation,which was published in 1975,he remarkably puts forward the idea that “understanding is translating”,and he regards the process of translation as the hermeneutic motion,which is divided into four moves: trust,aggression,incorporation and restitution.Steiner's hermeneutic translation theory provides a new perspective for translation studies.This thesis adopts Steiner's hermeneutic motion theory as the theoretical framework and uses the case study method to analyze the English translation process of Jie Mi.It attempts to answer the question: how are the four steps of the hermeneutic motion manifested in the English translation process of Jie Mi? It is found that translators' initial trust in Jie Mi is mainly based on their personal interest and family background,the value of Jie Mi and their language and cultural competence as well.This trust is subsequently verified and strengthened by the encouragement of the famous sinologist and translator Julia Lovell and the request of the prestigious Penguin Group.Due to the differences between Chinese and English languages and cultures,the two translators invade the narrative,linguistic and cultural aspects of Jie Mi so as to excavate their meaning and value.At the incorporation stage,translators incorporate the form and meaning of Jie Mi.They mainly adopt the domesticating strategy to pursue the readability and acceptability of the translated text.Meanwhile,they make certain foreignizing translation to retain the linguistic and cultural characteristics of Jie Mi.At the restitution stage,translators compensate for Jie Mi in both linguistic and cultural aspects.At the linguistic level,they supplement the sentence components of the English sentences,so that the translated sentences can conform to the English syntactic rules and can fully express the meaning of the original sentence.They change the voice to compensate for the emotional attitude contained in the original sentence.At the cultural level,they adopt the translation methods such as transliteration plus further explanation,free translation and amplification to restitute the cultural connotation of the source text.This thesis is constituted by five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to the thesis,which presents research background,research questions,research methodology,research significance as well as the structure of this thesis.Chapter Two is literature review,which summarizes previous research on the English version of Jie Mi and George Steiner's hermeneutic motion theory both at home and abroad.Then it illuminates the necessity of this thesis.Chapter Three serves as the theoretical framework.In this chapter,the origin and development of hermeneutics is presented.Major representatives of hermeneutic translation theorists are introduced and George Steiner's hermeneutic motion theory is explained in detail.Chapter Four is a case study of the English version of Jie Mi.It makes an in-depth analysis of the four moves manifested in the English translation process of Jie Mi under the guidance of Steiner's hermeneutic motion theory.Chapter Five makes a conclusion of the major findings of this study.It points out the limitations of this study and provides suggestions for further study.This study discloses the English translation process of Jie Mi and the factors affecting Milburn and Payne's translation.At the same time,it proves that Steiner's hermeneutic motion theory has guiding significance for the research on translation process.It is expected to enrich the research on Decoded: A Novel and bring some inspiration to the translation of Chinese literature.