A Study On Translator’s Subjectivity In The English Version Of Lie Yuan From George Steiner’s Hermeneutic Perspective

Culture going out is an important policy for China’s cultural construction in the 21 st century.The translation of literary works is an effective way for culture going out.As the second part of “Desert Trilogy” by famous contemporary Chinese writer Xue Mo,Lie Yuan is a true portrayal of the desert life of farmers,herders and hunters in western China.The language of the novel has local cultural characteristics,covering a large number of dialects and colloquial expressions of Wuwei,Gansu province.The English version of Lie Yuan was jointly translated by famous American sinologist Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Li-Chun Lin and published in 2018.Excellent literary works and the translations can better convey Chinese culture and promote culture to go out.Hermeneutics is a discipline that focuses on understanding and interpretation.As one of the important representatives of hermeneutic translation theory,George Steiner pointed out that the process of translation is the operation of interpretation,including four motions: “trust”,“aggression”,“incorporation” and “compensation”.These four steps all explore the specific translation process from the perspective of the translator,fully demonstrating the translator’s autonomy and subjective initiative in dealing with the text,providing a strong theoretical foundation for the study of the translator’s subjectivity.Based on Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion,this study selects the English version of Lie Yuan as the research material to explore the exertion of the translator’s subjectivity in the process of trust,aggression,incorporation and compensation.Meanwhile,this study analyzes translation methods adopted by the translator under the display of translator’s subjectivity in order to convey the language and cultural characteristics of the original text better.The research results show that: 1.Based on the appreciation of Lie Yuan and trust in Xue Mo,as well as his language and cultural competence,the translator establishes trust with original work;the translator invades source language out of his linguistic,cultural and religious consciousness;the translator absorbs the form and meaning of original text in varying degrees;the translator makes compensation for the original text by supplementing background knowledge and at the syntactic level.The four steps all reflect the autonomy and subjective initiative of the translator.2.In the aggression motion: in order to accurately translate the dialects,sayings,Tibetan Buddhism and Taoism expressions in the original text,the translator uses a variety of translation methods such as free translation,transliteration,syntactic shift,literal translation,idiomatic translation and paraphrase;In the incorporation motion: the translator mainly uses literal translation and word-for-word translation to retain the Liangzhou tune,children’s song,poems and other forms of the original text.Meanwhile,free translation and paraphrase are mostly used by the translator to convey the meaning of short expressions with dialect characteristics in the original text;In the compensation motion:the translator employs addition as major translation method to compensate for the lost meaning of the original text in the translation,so as to achieve the balance between source language and target language.In the three motions,free translation is the most frequently used method,followed by literal translation and addition.And in the operation of Hermeneutic Motion,the translator’s subjectivity runs through the entire translation activity.