Translator’s Subjectivity In Adaptation And Selection

Of all ages, from the East to the West, translation is always playing an importantrole in the historical and cultural course of human being while translation study is also ahot topic in the translation field. Since the1950s, great progress has been made intranslation practice and its theoretical construction, which have also been improved anddeveloped by many scholars at home and abroad from an interdisciplinary perspective.Yet, as the most active and positive factor in translation, the translator is always easilybeing ignored. Indeed, there still exists divergence nowadays about who is thetranslation subject. The translator’s status and fate haven’t been changed or improveduntil the cultural turn in1970s when the emphasis of translation study shifted from thesource-text orientation to target-text orientation, gradually visualizing the translator’simportance. As a result, the study of the translator and the translator’s subjectivitybecomes a hot topic in the translation study field especially during the recent twodecades.The study of the translator’s subjectivity has drawn much attention in the translationstudy field which many scholars have explored with some achievements. Some of themalso stressed the translator’s importance in translation process but these studies andemphasis are somewhat excessive. Meanwhile, there is still almost no systematic ideasand theories over the translator’s subjectivity. Therefore, we may say that the study isstill in its infancy. Professor Hu Gengshen tried for the first time to make an ontologicalstudy of translation, established the adaptation and selection theory based on Darwin’sNatural Selection, and proposed the idea of translator-centeredness. He definestranslation as “a selection activity of the translator’s adaptation to fit the translationaleco-environment”(Hu,2004:220-221). Here, translation becomes the final result oftranslators’ adaptation and selection. His emphasis on the translator’sselections/adaptations according to other elements confirms with the concept in ourstudies of translators’ subjectivity. The adaptation and selection theory is adopted in the thesis for analyzing thetranslator’s subjectivity which is reflected in the translator’s subjective adaptation andselection during the translation process. Besides, three Chinese versions of Oliver Twistwill be analyzed in the thesis as a case study for further illustrating the practicality ofthe theory and the importance of the translator’s subjectivity in translation, which iswhat the thesis aims to achieve.The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter one is the introduction of the researchaims, research scope, methodology and the framework of the thesis, etc.Chapter two is the theoretical introduction. First the previous researches over thetheory, the translator’s subjectivity, as well as the studies on Charles Dickens andChinese versions of Oliver Twist are summarized including their limits, and the threeversions adopted in thesis and the three translators are introduced. Second, thetheoretical base of the thesis----adaptation and selection theory is also expatiated indetail.Chapter three is the main body. The author first sheds light on the translator’ssubjectivity and its key concepts while clarifying the relationship between the theoryand the translator’s subjectivity, which is also the innovative point of the thesis. In thischapter, the three versions of Oliver Twist are analyzed with comparison to furtherillustrate the practicality of the theory and that the translator subjectively makesmulti-dimensional adaptation and selection in the translational eco-environment, thusexerting the translator’s subjectivity in the social, cultural and interpersonal dimension.Chapter four the author comes to a conclusion including the findings, thesignificance and the limitations of the study and suggestions for future research.