A Comparative Study On Translator’s Subjectivity In Two English Versions Of Meng Zi From The Perspective Of George Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion

The present study was a comparative study on translator’s subjectivity in two English versions of Meng Zi from the perspective of Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion.It selected the translators’ subjectivity manifested in the 1895 version of The Works of Mencius translated by James Legge and the 1970 version of Mencius translated by D.C.Lau as the study objects and the Hermeneutic Motion put forward by George Steiner in his book After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation as the theoretical basis for the study.In the thesis,the translators’ subjectivity reflected in the two representative English translations of Meng Zi was analyzed from the Hermeneutic Motion of trust,aggression,incorporation and compensation.In this thesis,it tried to find out the lexical,syntactical and rhetorical differences between the two translations so as to explore the manifestation of translators’ subjectivity in their translations and the internal reasons that count for the choices of their translation methods and translation techniques in different context.The present study found that in the first step,Legge established “trust” out of his religious needs and personal preference,while Lau established his “trust” out of the social needs and his own academic favor.In choosing the reference,both of them established “trust” in Zhao Qi’s version of Meng Zi Zhu Shu Jie Jing and regarded it as the standard original text.In the second step,due to the “aggression” of their historical,cultural and personal consciousness,the two translators formed different understandings of the original text.Influenced by the historical consciousness,Legge intended to use elegant and ancient English,while Lau intended to use simple and accurate modern English in translation.Their translations of proper nouns were different in that they adopted different editions of Wade-Giles romanization.Influenced by the cultural consciousness,Legge and Lau made different interpretations of the core cultural concepts like “Ren” in the original text.Due to their different personal consciousness,the two translators made different translations in some details.In the third step,the two translators “incorporated” the characteristics of Chinese and English languages at the lexical,syntactical and rhetorical levels,and selected different translation methods and techniques to interpret the original text.It was then found that Legge intended to use the translation method of literal translation,while Lau intended to use the translation method of liberal translation.In practical translation,both of the two translators intended to use various translation techniques,such as conversion,addition and combination.In the fourth step,in order to“compensate” the lack of linguistic information and cultural information in translations,the two translators made direct compensation in their translations and indirect compensation in their paratext.It was expected that the present thesis could enrich the study of translator’s subjectivity and expand the application of Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion in classics translation in order to bring inspiration to translators to better reproduce the ideological and cultural connotations contained in Chinese classics in the future.