On The Rationality Of Retranslation From The Perspective Of Philosophical Hermeneutics

Philosophical hermeneutics is a discipline about understanding and interpretation.Translation is the understanding and interpretation of the source text's meaning.This nature of translation determines its extremely close relationship with hermeneutics.Philosophical hermeneutics provides a theoretical support and a new perspective for translation studies,especially the retranslation studies.This thesis attempts to study the rationality of retranslation from the three core principles of philosophical hermeneutics: the historicity of understanding,the fusion of horizons and the effective history.A Tale of Two Cities is one of the outstanding masterpieces of Charles Dickens.Since its first translation in China in 1913,A Tale of Two Cities has been translated many times.Five translations of A Tale of Two Cities are selected as the research objects of this study.Differences among these five translations will be found first with the help of corpus tools,and then qualitative analysis will be used to analyze these differences to explore the reasons and the rationality behind these differences from the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics.This study focuses on two questions:(1)What are the differences among the five translations of A Tale of Two Cities?(2)How to explain the differences between the five translations and the rationality of the retranslation from the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics?The major findings are as follows:The historical understanding,the fusion of horizons and the effective history contribute to the differences among translations and provide rationality for retranslation.Understanding always exists in a historical way.Understanding of the source text is influenced by the specialty of history.The historicity of understanding will inevitably lead to prejudice and even mistranslation.Translators have different prejudice.Therefore,there must be differences among translations.The source text has the horizon of the author and the translator has his own horizon with characteristics of times which he lives in.The fusion of horizons is a process that the two different horizons fuse with each other and reach a new one.Different translators have different horizons.Thus the same source text will have different translations.The fusion of horizons leads to the differences in translations and confirms the rationality of retranslation.According to the effective history,the meaning of the source text is open and can never be exhausted.Its meaning is beyond the era that generates it.The meaning of the text is constantly being formed together with the interpreter.In this sense,the retranslation is diverse and reasonable.The historicity of understanding,the fusion of horizons and the effective history all fully affirm the difference among translations and the rationality of retranslation.