The Application Of Hermeneutic Motion Theory To Children’s Literature Translation

This translation report is based on the novel Genesis Begins Again,which wins the Newbery Honor Prize in 2020 and tells a story about how a 13-year-old girl overcomes deep-rooted racial prejudice and finally learns to love herself.This report takes George Steiner’s hermeneutic motion theory as the theoretical framework in combination with some translation cases to explore the application of the theory in this translation practice.Hermeneutics is a discipline on text comprehension and interpretation,and translation process is inseparable from interpretation,which means translators should understand and perceive the text on the basis of deep understanding.Based on hermeneutics,George Steiner proposes hermeneutic motion theory,who believes that translation is understanding and divides translation process into four steps,respectively called trust,aggression,incorporation and compensation.Based on this theory,each case study is compared between two translation methods with and without the guidance of it to analyze how this theory embodies each step in the process of text translation as well as the translation strategies adopted by the translator in dealing with vocabulary and syntaxThrough the analysis of translation,it turns out that hermeneutic motion theory fully illustrates the translation process.First,translator’s trust in the rationality of the original and the significance of translation is the premise of translation.Secondly,to facilitate children readers’ understanding,the translator makes aggression to lexical level of the original such as aggression to multiple-meaning words and referential words so that the translation can be more specific and better expresses the personality of characters and their psychological activities.Thirdly,to make the expressions and the form closer to target language readers,the translator makes incorporation of form and meaning that is extracted from the original into the target language by using different translation strategies such as domestication and addition.Finally,translator’s compensation is to balance the source text and the target text,which is mainly reflected in the compensation for four-character structures,reduplicated words and interjections at lexical level and the compensation at syntactic level to enhance the rhythm and tone of the translation.Each step of hermeneutic motion theory is indispensable and it provides guidance for translation studies,which achieves the integration between source language readers and target language readers.