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1.4 Research Methodology
The author chooses Yang’s and Hawkes’ versions in order to emphasis the significance of translator’s subjectivity. Yang is Chinese, while Hawkes is English. Their different culture backgrounds, as well as different target readers, give them different ideas of choosing translation strategy. From the perspective of translator's subjectivity, this thesis studies the translation strategy of conceptual metaphor in the two versions in virtue of descriptive translation theory.
This thesis picks "red" and "poem" as representatives of conceptual metaphors in A Dream of Red Mansions, because they both have a lot of connotative meaning. First, A Dream of Red Mansions, in which the color red has many symbols and images, displays the culture of redness in China fully. Hawkes especially mentioned in the preface of Story of the Stone that he thought Hong (red) in Chinese has different meanings from the red in English, and Hong in Chinese has the similar meaning of golden or green in English. He is aware that there is some sort of loss there, but he has lacked the ingenuity to avert it (Hawkes, 1973: 43). Second, poems play a unique role in portraying the images of the characters and expressing the theme of A Dream of Red Mansions. However, they are not easy to translate. Especially when we come with the poems containing metaphors in them, we often find it even more difficult to translate. So translation of poems can start from the conceptual metaphor, through transference of which the translation of theme can be achieved.
2 Translator’s Subjectivity
For a long time, translation theories had been perceived as secondary to comparative linguistics, whereby translation had been approached mainly in terms of the comparison between language structures in an ontological way. But when translation researchers came to realize that such a prescriptive and linguistic approach was inadequate to explain a human activity as complex as translation, they set to examine translation in a broader cultural and social context. Moreover, many interdisciplinary scholars, with their insightful perspectives, also began to challenge the dominant translation theories by approaching translation in a multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary way. All these gave momentum to the cultural turn in translation studies. It is with this boom of various schools of translation theories that the cultural and inpidual subjectivity of the translator has become an inevitably important topic in the field of translation studies.
2.1 Definition of the Translator’s Subjectivity
The subjectivity of the translator is revealed throughout the process of translation. It starts from the selection of the source text, cultural purpose of the translation, translation strategies all the way to the comprehension, interpretation of the source text as well as linguistic and artistic recreation of the text (Ji Yu, 2009: 15-17).
2.2 Translator’s Subjectivity in the Process of Literary Translation
The specific process of literary translation is the essential part where the subjectivity of the translator is conspicuously manifested. So in order to take an exploration of the subjectivity of the translator, we need to, first of all, examine the translating process in addition to the nature of translation. Translation is not a simple transfer of the source text to the target text, but a linguistic and cultural communication which takes place in a certain socio-cultural context. And in the specific translation process, the translator works chronologically as the reader, interpreter and re-creator of the source text.
The crucial step of translation act falls on the conveyance of the source text in the mind of the translator into the target language. It is just in this encoding process that the subjectivity of the translator is intensively and fully practiced, in the choice of source text, adoption of translation strategy and preference of language style.