Translating A Stream Of Consciousness Novel From Perspective Of Steiner's Hermeneutic Motion

The translation material is excerpted from which was awarded the 2018 Man Booker Prize(one of the world's most influential literary prizes awarded annually to the best original novel written in English and published in the UK).A stream of consciousness(SOC)novel is different from a traditional one in terms of form and structure,with many interior monologues and free associations.Also,when reading the SOC novel,readers sometimes work hard to combine plots scattering in different paragraphs to understand meaning,for there may be no connection between paragraphs.Linguistic Deviation can be found in the SOC novel,such as the creation of words,the innovation of syntactic orders,etc.With many long sentences,ambiguous boundaries between paragraphs,an author's retreat from his or her position and elaboration based on the loose consciousness activities of a protagonist,the translation of the SOC novel is challenging.A translator should be sensitive to deliberate structures and be careful enough to deal with details to reproduce the characteristics of the original text.In translating Milkman,the translator applies the formation of George Steiner's four hermeneutic motions--trust,aggression,incorporation,compensation--to understand and represent the above characteristics of the SOC novel.She finds that the motions can also be used to guide the translation of the SOC novel.For example,only when a translator trusts the literary position of a novel and its values can he or she emphasize a complicated plot in the SOC novel,so that he or she will not change its unique feature.The aggression phase stresses pre-understanding,which can allow a translator to know the background of an author and the features of the SOC novel.And based on discourse analysis,a translator is able to think over why an author organizes passages in this way,including the use of punctuation,the arrangement of interior monologue,etc.Meantime,a translator should be informed of differences between English and Chinese,namely,knowing clashes between source text and target text,and their cultural clashes,so that he or she can restructure word structures that are not consistent with a spirit of the original and Chinese readers' habits.The phase of incorporation allows a translator to take the readability and acceptability of the translation into consideration.Inappropriate domestication and foreignization will be avoided.A translator tries to make complex languages in the novel more readable,focusing on the fluency of the target text while maintaining the form characterized by stream of consciousness.Under the circumstances,readers can experience an author's deliberate plot arrangement and trace her true intention.The last phase of compensation enables a translator to compensate for the part which is off-balance.When translating words with historical background or cultural color,a translator should weigh the necessity against adding notes,for this helps readers understand the target text more easily.The report consists of five chapters.It focuses on an analysis of how the translator interprets texts,sentences,and words based on Steiner's hermeneutic motion.The report finds that it is better to maintain the features of the source text,and adopt direct translation and foreignization when interpreting the content and forms which are deliberately organized by the author in the SOC novel,such as interior monologue,free association,linguistic variation,punctuation,etc.As a result,readers can recognize the uniqueness of the SOC novel,which is different from a traditional one.As for the words or phrases containing historical meaning or the ones bearing culture color,the translator holds that the adoption of domestication or addition of notes will make readers more easily understand the source text;accordingly,the original text will be more acceptable.Finally,the report argues that a translator should not exclude the SOC novel as it differs from the traditional novel in terms of content or forms.It is suggested that expression should be based on understanding the process of the translation.The adoption of absolute domestication or foreignization without understanding is not recommended.