The Psychological Study Of Translators

With the development of modern psychology and the reversion of humanism, both social sciences and natural sciences focus on and devote their attention to the humankind. Disengaged from the long-term argument between linguistic schools and literary schools, translation studies accordingly break another way to enforce the research on the subject of translation in different scientific fields and study it at a different angle. It actually opens up a new path to contemplate translational action from the point of view of psychology, especially psychology in art and literature. A translator, as subject of translation, is cogitative, sentient and individual and his psychological elements would exert a profound influence on the process of translation and translation product. In the process of translation, subject of translation, qua aesthetic subject, experiences an aesthetic activity, which includes empathy, sympathy and recreation, in order to recreate a version. Therefore, translational action can be reckoned as a mental process, which is aesthetic and creative. In this way, the psychological study of translators can highly redound to translators' status, to profoundly understanding the complicated translational action from various aspects, and to abundantly producing the first-class translators and outstanding versions.Because of multifarious factors, both in overseas and domestic research fields of translation, the psychological study of translators can not be called systematic and all-sided. Meanwhile, the existing studies on translators' mental activity, mainly on the basis of cognitive psychology, focus on the psychological phenomena such as cognition, thinking, understanding, memory and so forth, to bring into translation studies these psychological concepts like cognition, thinking, understanding, memory, gestalt and so on. This kind of study, to a certain extent, still treats the process of translation as rational rather than emotional, external rather than internal, scientific rather than artistic. Researchers do not attach much importance to these factors: aesthetic experience, empathy, sympathy, recreation, motive, personality and temperament. In this thesis, quite the contrary, the author researches systematically into the mental process of translating based upon psychology in art and literature to construct the mental schema of translational action, and in virtue of other relativeChapter Eight sums up the above seven chapters and comes to the conclusion of this thesis, that is, the process of translation is also translators' mental process as well as the process of aesthetic recreation, rather than the mechanical encoding and decoding. The mental schema of translational action is put forward to illustrate intuitively and perspicuously the complicated relationship between all the factors in the mental process of translation. Also the limitations of the thesis are pointed out and the thesis ends in optimistic expectation of the construction of psycho-translatology.