Study On Literature Translation Strategies With Reference To Two Chinese Versions Of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

Hermeneutics, which studies the methodological principles of interpretation, is a theoryprobing into the understanding and interpretation of meaning, which has been applied totranslation studies since1970s. The study of translation from the hermeneutic prospective is acomparatively new approach in translation studies. The hermeneutic study provides a newview for translation studies and becomes a challenge to traditional translation theories. It leadsto a revolution period of translation studies. In terms of hermeneutics, literary translation is aprocess of fusion of horizons and a process of interpretation. The source author, the sourcetext, the interpreter, the target readers are several essential parts of this process. Differentinterpreters have their own horizons (including language, culture and religion) that would leadto different choices of translation theories, which would cause the different translated versionsof the same source text. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics gives a good explanation ofthe differences in translation and the necessity of re-translation.This dissertation retraces the development of hermeneutics and its key concepts, andmakes a comparative case study on the translation of the same literary works by differenttranslators at different historical periods from the perspective of hermeneutics. The literarywork selected for this case study is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.James Joyce is regarded as the greatest writers after Shakespeare in the history of Englishliterature, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is his semi-autobiography, which hasbeen translated into various languages and there are four Chinese versions up till now. Thisdissertation attempts to make a comparative study of the translation strategies in the twoChinese translated versions by Huang Yushi and Li Jingmin from the hermeneuticperspective.