A Study On The Translator's Subjectivity From The Perspective Of Hermeneutics

With the "cultural turn" in translation research in the 1970s,the dominant role of the translator attracted greater attention.The issue of the translator's subjectivity has gradually become a hot topic in translation studies.An increasing number of translation theorists have expounded the translator's subjectivity from various perspectives and made great achievements.Hermeneutics is among them an important new perspective.In the book After Babel:Aspects of Language and Translation(1975),the famous translation theorist George Steiner tries to adopt concepts of Hermeneutics into translation researches and advances his celebrated Fourfold Translation Motion Theory(FTMT for short),which has provided a new theoretical basis and research method for the study of the translator's subjectivity.The Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger has been considered to be an important and enduring classic work in contemporary American literature.Its distinct expressions and unique characters attracted its Chinese readers' attention when it was introduced into China.Two Chinese versions have won great popularity among readers,Shi Xianrong's version(1983)and Sun Zhongxu's version(2007).Above all,the two Chinese versions have many unique features,which can be effectively analyzed and explained from the perspective of the translator's subjectivity.This thesis makes a comparative analysis of the two Chinese versions of The Catcher in the Rye by applying Steiner's FTMT.Some typical examples are provided to focus on how the two translators manifest their translator's subjectivity in the four steps of their translation process.The two translators' trust comes from their choice of the original text and their linguistic and cultural competence.Then they "walk" into the source text out of their cultural awareness as well as personal understandings so as to realize the incorporation of content and form by adopting different translation strategies.Finally they employ various kinds of compensatory methods to compensate for the unavoidable loss brought about by the first three steps.A comparative analysis of the two versions has revealed that the two translators'experience,personality,preference.,linguistic and cultural competence and so on have all led to their subjectivity in different ways.On the whole,in the process of FTMT,Shi tends to foreignize the original while the Sun tends to domesticate the source text.Shi's foreignized translation includes more cultural specifics,making its translation as faithful as possible to the original and endeavoring to pave a smooth way for the target readers to appreciate western culture.Sun's domesticated translation is more fluent and helps the target readers comprehend the translation easily.Both Shi and Sun show their translators'subjectivity in their versions.It is found that the translator plays a dominant and irreplaceable role in concrete translation practice and that the translator's subjectivity is at work throughout the whole translation process and exerts a significant influence on the translation effect.This study has expanded the perspectives of the research on the translation of The Catcher in the Rye,thus being of some value for further studies on the translator's subjectivity.