（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）心境相似度”假说——以《飞鸟集》汉译为例.pdf

iii “心境相似度”假说“心境相似度”假说 以飞鸟集汉译为例以飞鸟集汉译为例 摘要摘要 本文以翻译心理为研究课题，运用翻译心理学理论，对一些传统的翻译理论 命题进行了置疑和反叛。翻译心理学是心理学与翻译研究的结合，是一门新兴的 交叉性学科，翻译心理学也对传统的翻译观造成了巨大的冲击和挑战，但它同时 也开辟了翻译研究的新领域，形成了跨学科、多角度的研究方法，是翻译研究的 必然趋势。 然而由于各种因素， 国内外对翻译心理学的研究既不系统， 也不完善， 希望本文能够为翻译心理学的发展完善略尽绵力。 本文以张兴旺的翻译心理理论为理论框架，结合他提出的三种翻译动机，即 报国图强的动机、自娱和娱人的动机以及实现自我的动机，笔者提出了“心境相 似度”的假说，即在翻译过程中，译者心境与原文作者心境的相似度会影响译品 的忠实度。研究译者心境不能脱离译本的研究，因此，出于对飞鸟集的喜爱， 本文作者选择飞鸟集汉译作为研究例证。 飞鸟集是诺贝尔文学奖得主泰 戈尔的代表作之一，被称为“世界上最杰出的诗集之一” 。它包括 300 余首清丽 的小诗，每首诗都不长，短小的语句道出了深刻的人生哲理，引领世人探寻真理 和智慧的源泉。据说“阅读它，能知道一切事物的意义” ，在新诗萌芽阶段还一 度出现过“飞鸟”情结，它对中国文化影响可见一斑。 笔者通过对郑振铎和周策纵飞鸟集两个汉译本的对比研究，发现了周氏 译本出现的误译和郑氏译本的直译和欧化等现象， 从翻译心理的角度解释了周氏 的误译是因为父亲的离世的影响；而郑振铎的翻译较早，是在五四时期进行的， 他希望通过引入泰格尔的文学来滋养中国文学。 本文进一步发掘两译者和原作者 泰戈尔的心境之间的相同点与不同点，最终得出结论，翻译的主体作为有思想、 有感情、有个性的译本的再创造者，其心理因素对翻译的过程和翻译的结果都产 生了深刻的影响。即因为译者心境不同，会对飞鸟集译本的情境再现产生影 响。 关键词关键词:飞鸟集；翻译心理学；心境；情境再现；郑振铎；周策纵 ii similarity of states of mind hypothesis exemplified by translations of stray birds abstract key words: stray birds; translation psychology; reproduction of the situation; zheng zhenduo; zhou cezong 1 chapter one introduction 1.1 stray birds and its author as a complete study of translators psychology can not be done without a translation, it is rather essential to introduce the text and its author tagore first, which may also facilitate our analysis of the authors state of mind in chapter five. 1.1.1 stray birds stray birds, known as “one of the most excellent works in the world”, is the most famous representative work of rabindranath tagore. stray birds takes the form of proverbs, and there is no title to each poem. they are arranged according to numbers. every single piece of poems consists of only two to four lines. most of the poems are figurative, sensitive and full of connotations. stray birds is made up of epigrams, short verses and mostly translations of the epigrammatic verses. the brevity, economy and intensity of these verses are striking and the combination of wit and wisdom has a magical lilt. the characteristics of short verses are that they are good at capturing the poetic and philosophical instants in life and that they can bring the endless revelation and associations. the poems appear unconnected on the surface, but underneath they form a track of the poets inner thoughts. the whole book is in fact a collection of the sparkles of the poets thought. the book is so notable that during its embryonic and growing stage of modern verse, there occurred a large number of poetic texts which depicted stray birds in nature to describe the drifting condition of life. we call them the “stray birds” complex. the famous writer bing xin is one of the numerous people who are greatly 2 influenced by stray birds. she herself once said that her two collections of poems a maze of stars and spring water were written under the influence of tagores stray birds. bing xin remarked in her recollection that, “i happened to see zheng zhenduos translation of tagores stray birds. stray birds is a collection of short pieces of few words and phrases but filled with poetic feeling, artistic insight and philosophical understanding. it struck a chord in me”. in fact, bing xins two collections do imitate stray birds to some degree in the aspect of contents and forms. stray birds is composed of three hundred and twenty-five short poems, and every poem consists of the essence of life and possesses its own philosophical meanings. it is said that you can know the significance of everything by reading the book, and as we can not study a translators state of mind without a translation and out of the love for stray birds, the writer chooses it as the research subject of the thesis. 1.1.2 rabindranath tagore may 7th, 1861 in calcutta, india, rabindranath tagore was born into a wealthy family. tagore found that he did not like the conventional educational system at all, so he was taught at home in bengali, with english lessons. at the age of eight, tagore began to write poems. when he was sixteen, he published his first substantial collection of poems under the pseudonym bhanushingho (“sun lion” in english) and wrote his first short stories and dramas in 1877. in 1879, he enrolled at university college, at london, but was called back by his father to return to india in 1880. during the first 51 years of his life, he achieved some success in the calcutta area of india where he was born and raised with his many stories, songs and plays. he published his short stories monthly in a friends magazine and he even played the leading role in a few of the public performances of his plays. however, outside the calcutta area, he was little known and not known at all outside india. these all changed in 1912. in that year tagore returned to england for the first time ever since his failed attempt at law school as a teenager. now a man of 51, he was accompanied by his son. on the way over to england he started translating, for the first time, his latest selections of poems, gitanjali, into english. almost all of his 3 work prior to that time had been written in his native language of bengali. a friend of tagores, a famous artist he had met in india, rothenstein, learned of the translation, and asked to see it. reluctantly, tagore let him have the notebook. the poems were incredible. he called his friend, w.b. yeats, and talked yeats into looking at the hand scrawled notebook. yeats was enthralled. he later wrote the introduction to gitanjali when it was published in september 1912 in a limited edition by the india society in london. thereafter, both the poetry and the man were an instant sensation, first in london literary circles, and soon thereafter in the entire world. less than a year later, in 1913, rabindranath received the nobel prize for literature. he was the first non-westerner to be so honored. overnight he became famous and began world lecture tours promoting inter-cultural harmony and understanding. all his life he wrote over one thousand poems; eight volumes of short stories; almost two dozen plays and play-lets; eight novels; and many books and essays on philosophy, religion, education and social topics. 1.2 layout of the thesis with a focus on translation psychology theory, this thesis purports to explore whether the similarity of states of mind of the translator and the author affects the reproduction of situation. by comparing the two chinese versions of stray birds, analyzing which version can better reproduce the situations of original poems and the translators respective translation purposes, we can infer reasons behind the phenomena. the thesis is divided into six parts. part one gives a brief introduction to the original text and its author. part two is a literature review of translation studies on two translators of stray birds namely zheng zhenduo and zhou cezong, and on translation psychology overseas and abroad; research questions are also clarified in this part. part three mainly focuses on zhang xingwangs translation psychology theory. part four examines tagores and both the translators states of mind and tries to prove the theory with a short summary. part five further exemplifies the theory and the writers hypothesis with poems in stray birds to find out the translators translation 4 psychology. part six summarizes the whole thesis and also the limitations of the thesis are pointed out and the thesis ends in optimistic expectation of the studies concerning stray birds. 5 chapter two literature review 2.1 studies on zheng zhenduo and on zhou cezhong zeng jingjing in wuhan university once wrote an article named “a faithful executor of the translation thoughts, to translate poems with poetic flavorto see zheng zhenduos translation thoughts from the stray birds” which discussed the translation strategies adopted by zheng zhenduo and his characteristics of translation of stray birds; wu jianmings “zhen zhengduo and translation” also mentioned that the translation of stray birds had an influence on the translator bing xin and the great significance to chinas new literature construction and chinese-foreign literary exchanges; “a battle of words” between zheng zhenduo and liang shiqiu and zhao mengtang concerning the translation of stray birds was recorded by feng xinhua in his “zheng zhenduo and tagore”; niu shuilians “zheng zhenduo and hindu literature” and his another article named “the spreading and influence of tagores works in china” were also very influential; and zhu xiaojings “the acceptive rhetoric and translationcomments on zheng zhenduo and zhou cezhongs translation of stray birds” analyzed the differences between the two versions from the perspective of acceptive rhetorics. 2.2 studies on translation psychology as to the study of translation psychology, it is known to all that linguistic schools and literary schools have a long-term argument in the translation field and compete with each other to show their respective superiority so that they can dominate in the field of translation studies. for quite a long time, translation theorists focus on a 6 vexed question, which is whether translation is a science or an art. with the development of modern psychology and the reversion of humanism, however, social sciences and natural sciences become more and more connected to give birth to large numbers of new subjects, which include the subject of the combination of psychology and translatology. since the 20th century, psychological studies have made plentiful and substantial achievements and have been combined with various subjects. translation theorists eyes are also cast upon psychological field to study mental process of translation. roger t.bell，in britain, sets up models of translation in his book translation and translating: theory and practice with the aid of psychology, especially cognitive psychology. based on functional linguistics, he illustrates the dominant position of meaning in translation and adopts the results of psychological studies to expatiate information management, especially in the process of translation. he thinks the addition of a psychological perspective in translation studies can open the way not only for a greater understanding of translating and interpreting but also for a deepening of our understanding of human communication in general: a shift which can establish translation studies as a major and perhaps independent field of study linked symbolically with all the human sciences and in particular though by no means exclusively with linguistics and psychology. translation theorists in china attach importance to the psychological study of translators for a quite long time. they probe into translators motives, styles and inspirational phenomena besides the research on the psychological phenomena such as cognition, thinking, understanding, memory. they reach a series of valuable achievements: yangwuneng analyzes translators mental process of translation based on his translation practice; fang mengzhi focuses on mental process of translation from the psychological point of view as he mentions the methodology of constructing translatology; zhang chengzhu holds that empathy is the key point in the course of literal translation; shen suqin discusses the inspirational phenomenon in the process of translation; jiang qiuxia and quan xiaohui employ the gestalt aesthetic model to make a dynamic study of aesthetic progress in translation. thus, it can be seen that the relative psychological theories are brought into translation studies, both domestically 7 and overseas. some researchers hold that it is interdisciplinary and shall be attached to more attention. however, only a small number of translators have done researches into this field. zhang xingwang in tongji university wrote an essay titled “some views on eminent translators psychology guiding creation in translating”, which holded that the study of the psychology in translating should not be restricted only to the study of the motivation and the working psychology of all translators because it was far from enough. it should also take translators psychology guiding creation in translating into consideration. sichuan normal universitys yan linhai proposed the subjects and ways of study in translation psychology, which to a great extent filled the gap in the research. he thought translation psychology should study the translators psychological activities in three aspects, namely linguistic, aesthetic and cultural psychology. zhou sisi, han jing and wang qian, coauthors of the paper “the inevitable trend of translation studiestranslation psychology”, generalized some foreign scholars thoughts about psychology of translation in order to exemplify the importance and urgency of translation psychology as a branch of translation studies. song ping wrote a thesis for her master degree concerning this field named “the psychological studies of translators” which expounded on the factors influencing translators in the process of translating. her conclusion was that the process of translating was actually the translators mental process. yang jie and cao mingyue considered the translator as a postman, who rushed about between the original author and the target readers in their “an analysis of the psychological differences between translating, writing and reading”. they believed knowing the differences can better understand the translators translation psychology and the essence of translation. tang jianhe and gou pings article “studies on translation process from the perspective of psychology” put emphasis on the process of translating respectively from the angle of social psychology, cognitive psychology and personality psychology. they tried further uncovering the inner law of the translation process. “influences of translators psychological factors on literary translation” was a paper written by li qingyun to deal with literary translation from the aspect of translators psychological factors. 8 2.3 research questions in psychology, “state of mind” is often used. just as the term implies, the state of mind is a lasting and stable feeling, which has two characteristics, diffusibility and chronicity. diffusibility means that the same attitude will be adopted towards all the things around people when they are in some state of mind. once translators are about to translate, they would try their best to put inappropriate feelings aside, however diffusibility of state of mind are so powerful that their state of mind can still be sensed in their translations. chronicity means it is long-lasting so a state of mind may go across the whole process of translation and as a result may affect the translators judgments and thoughts. one important condition of delivering the emotions of the original text is the feelings of the translators, without which there can be no artistic translation. translators have to seriously reproduce every image and try to come close to the feelings in the original text so that the readers would feel they are reading the original works. guo moruo once illustrated with his experience in translating witt and faust, if the translators feelings happen to coincide with the original authors feeling, the process of translating would be much smoother and it thus results in better versions. the translators understandings of the original text and their judgments and choices of words are determined by their psychological factors. therefore, in this thesis the writer coins a concept, that is “the similarity of state of mind”, to assist the study and proposes an assumption that the more similar the translators state of mind is to that of the original author, the more faithful the translation would be to the original text, or to put it in another way, the translation can better reproduce the situation of the original poems. whether the similarity of states of mind decides the faithfulness? how to determine the similarity of state of mind? these are the research questions of the thesis. with regard to the first question, the writers answer is obvious affirmative because the writers hypothesis is that the similarity of states of mind decides the 9 faithfulness to some degree, yet this assumption still needs to be proved in the following chapters. lets answer the second question first. the authors and the translators states of mind at that time may not be directly known by now for historical reasons, which poses great challenges to translation studies. we may not contact the translators face to face, but we still have access to their translation psychologies by way of research method. the research method of translation psychology can be classified into speculative and empirical study, and the former one is called qualitative research and the latter one is called quantitative research. the qualitative research determines the nature of the phenomena in translation while the quantitative research deals with the factors in some specific phenomena. its main function is to consider some theory or assumption from the positivist view, therefore it is also called positivist research. both the methods will be employed in the thesis. specifically, there are four methods in translation psychology, namely, 1) analysis of the translators own reflections; 2) comparisons of different translations; 3) experimental analysis; 4) comparisons between the machine translation and translators versions. in this thesis the former two ways are adopted to prove the hypothesis that different factors in the psychological process of translation may lead to different translation products of the same original. never