Cultural Misreading With Reference To The Translator's Subjectivity

The last two decades have witnessed a great proliferation and diversification in translation studies.Since the 1980s,translation studies have shifted away from merely focusing on the transference of one language to another and towards cultural exploration.Translation now is widely accepted as an activity of cultural exchange.In the history of translation,the subjectivity of the translator has undergone a process of taking it from obscurity to recognition.According to traditional translation theory, the translator is usually in an indecisive position,and the significance of the translator's subjectivity in literary translation is overlooked.With the cultural turn, increasing importance has been attached to the subjective role played by the translator. As one of the important theoretical bases of the translator's subjectivity,hermeneutics provides a new perspective for translation studies.As a cognitive subject,the translator is not a passive recipient of meaning but an active and creative agent in the making of meaning.The interpretation of the source text is,to some degree,inevitably involved with misreading which reflects the translator's subjectivity and explains the existence of many translations of the source text.Harold Bloom,a famous deconstructionist critic,puts forward misreading theory in his book,A Map of Misreading,in which he points out that any activity of reading is always "belated" and "over-determined" by the literary language,while the literary meaning is underdetermined.It is impossible to pursue a fixed literary meaning by reading(1975:3).Cultural misreading mainly stems from cultural discrepancy.People, when they confront foreign cultures,consciously or unconsciously tend to make judgments and interpretations based on what they are familiar with or on the needs of their own culture.As one of the most translated works,Tao Te Ching is popular among Western readers.The translation and transmission of the book have enhanced the cultural exchange between China and the Western world.This dissertation attempts to take modern hermeneutics as its theoretical fra e ork to analyze cultural misreading by studying the translation history of the book.The dissertation points out that because both the translator and the text exist in a historical context,and different translators have been affected by different social-historical backgrounds,this inevitably presents the text historically.Because of the historicality of understanding,cultural misreading in literary translation is unavoidable and it helps the culture dissemination.