Translator's Subjectivity From The Perspective Of Gadamer's Hermeneutics

Translator's subjectivity is the subjective initiative exerted by translators during the process of translation.More specifically,it refers to the choice of the strategies of translation,the methods or techniques of translation,the explanation and linguistic recreation of the source text.The study on translator's subjectivity can help translators understand the actual situation in which their subjectivity is always at work and boost the correct understanding of the translated versions for the target readers.The issue of translator's subjectivity has been ignored for a long period of time and the researches on it did not begin to gain popularity until the cultural turn of the1970 s.A review of previous studies can reveal that neither in-depth theoretical analysis nor quantitative method has been widely adopted at the cost of accurate assessment,which has resulted in the subjective and even unreliable understanding of the role played by the translators.Translation is a subjective process that includes the reading and explanation of the source text,interlingual transfer as well as recreation through the target language on the part of the translators.It is workable to apply hermeneutic theory which emphasizes the subjective role played by the readers to survey translator's subjectivity in translation practice,and it is now possible,thanks to the development of the corpus linguistics,to make more objective and reliable investigations into translator's subjectivity.This thesis,by taking Lin Yutang's and Burton Watson's English versions of Chuang-tzu as cases of analysis,attempts to make a quantitative study of translator's subjectivity in the lexical,syntactic and textual levels with the aid of the corpus tool WordSmith and manual selection of representative examples.To pin down the reasons that contribute to the formation of translator's subjectivity as manifested in the two English versions of Chuang-tzu,the thesis will carry out the analysis within the theoretical framework of Gadamer's three principles of hermeneutics,namely the historicity of understanding,prejudices and the fusion of horizons.It is found that in the lexical level,Lin's English version is higher in lexical variation and his average word length is more than that of Watson.For Watson,he prefers to capitalize the initial letter of specific terms,such as titles and place names.Additionally,he is used to simple words rather than long and complex ones.He tries free translation to take care of the understanding and acceptance by the target readers.In the syntactic level,Watson chooses more words than Lin does to translate Chuang-tzu and his average sentence length is also more than that of Lin.His translation is vivid and colloquial and he uses common words for the convenience of the target readers when translating culturally-loaded elements.However,Lin chooses objective and neutral words for the translation of such elements.Besides,the number of total words and the average sentence length of Lin's version are closer to the source text.He prefers literal translation and sometimes uses transliteration.What is similar between the two versions is that the average sentence length belongs to medium length.In the textual level,the fact that Watson uses more connectives and conjunctions than Lin does shows that he adds more information in each sentence and lays more emphasis on the logical relationships between sentences.A conclusion can be drawn that Watson enjoys foreignization while Lin prefers domestication while translating Chuang-tzu.Such a difference in the strategies of translation comes as a result of the significant effects of translator's subjectivity.The fact that two translators may have different understandings and translations of the same source text is a result of the indelible effect of the historicity of understanding.What's more,both translators may have prejudices when they encounter the same source text,and thus they translate according to the ideas that initially occur to their own minds.Finally,after the realization of fusion of horizons,translators can translate as they understand.Neither of the two versions of Chuang-tzu can be called a complete and perfect translation because the process of translator's fusion of horizons is dynamic and may change with the passage of time.From the perspective of Gadamer's hermeneutics,the thesis,by integrating the methods of quantitative and qualitative analyses,tries to make a systematic and all-around investigation into the formation and functions of translator's subjectivitywithout making an assessment of which English version of Chuang-tzu is better,which to some extent makes a breakthrough in the study on translator's subjectivity.However,it has its own unavoidable limitations.In future studies,the research object could be broadened,and it is better to use more quantitative data collected with the aid of corpus tools and integrate some other theoretical assumptions about the construction of subjectivity or personal identity in the analysis of translator's subjectivity.