A Study On The Subjectivity Of The Retranslation Of EMMA

Retranslation is a normal phenomenon in the translation area. A large number of excellent literary works have been retranslated. Emma was the most mature and outstanding work of Jane Austen, it has been retranslated several times by several translators. As an important branch of translation studies, retranslation study has attracted a lot of attention from the scholars. In recent years, retranslations of the same work translated by different translators have been studied by a lot of scholars. And how the translator’s subjectivity influences his behavior has also become a research question.This thesis combines the qualitative and quantitative analysis together. The author constructs a small corpus of four Chinese retranslations of Emma. All the data collected from the text are analyzed by some corpus studied tools, and then be used as evidence in this thesis. The author uses the subjectivity as the theoretical basis to do the comparison of the four versions. In this thesis, the four Chinese retranslations can be divided into two kinds. One is different translators’ retranslations, including Liu Zhongde’s version in 1982, Jia wenyuan’s version in 2003. The other one is the same translator’s retranslations, which are Zhang Jinghao’s versions in 1984 and 1998.This thesis compares not only the versions of the same work retranslated by one translator, but also the versions retranslated by different translators. By comparing these versions, the different manifestations of subjectivity in these two kinds of retranslations and the causes will be described. Liu Zhongde applies his three-character translation principles(“faithfulness”, “expressiveness”, and “closeness”) in his translations. He uses his subjectivity to keep the structure and the meaning of the original text. And the words used in Liu’s translation also show the characteristic of his time. Like Liu Zhongde, Jia Wenyuan also maintains the structure of the original text as much as possible. He pays more attention to “accuracy” in his retranslation. On the contrary, Zhang Jinghao uses “acceptable” as a translation standard. He is more open to adopt the Chinese proverbs, and full of creativity without any restriction of translation theories. He devotes to reduce the “translationnese” in his second version, and modifies the inappropriate words and expressions in his first version. At the end of this thesis, the author tries to arrive at the conclusion that: Retranslating behavior is a kind of translator behavior; it is connected tightly with the translator himself. The translator is not only a pure linguistic being, but also an ordinary social being. The manifestation of his subjectivity is restricted by both the translator’s linguistic nature and the social nature. And also, the translator’s linguistic nature is influenced and restricted by his social nature. As a result, the manifestation of a translator’s subjectivity is a process of the socialization of the translator’s behavior.