Translators’ Subjectivity on the Lexical Level under the Pragmatic Adaptation Theory— A Case Study of the English Version of Fortress Besieged

Abstract

Traditional translation studies are source-text oriented, which usually ignore the study on translators and thereby make translators’ status marginalized; however, the “cultural turn” in the 1970s in translation studies expands the space of translation studies and makes translators’ subjectivity a hot topic. In this paper, the Pragmatic Adaptation Theory, proposed by Jef. Verschueren in his famous monograph Understanding Pragmatics is applied to the analysis of translators’ subjectivity. According to the theory, using language must consist of the continuous making of linguistic choices consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal and/or external reasons. As an actual language use, translation practice is also entangled with translators’ subjective choice-makings, both in form and in strategy. This paper offers the definition of translators’ subjectivity under the Pragmatic Adaptation Theory and selects Kelly & Mao’s English version Fortress Besieged to study the manifestation of the translators’ subjectivity in it from the lexical level. It is found that in their intentional choice-making process of translation, the translators of Fortress Besieged give full play to their subjectivity to make the target text adapt to the linguistic and cultural contexts of the target language. After the analysis on the lexical level, this paper concludes that the Pragmatic Adaptation Theory has powerful explanatory competence on the translators’ subjectivity displayed in the English version of Fortress Besieged and the so-called unfaithfulness in the target text is the result of the translators’ incessant adaptive choice-makings to achieve the translation purpose and the communicative effect of the target text.