A Semiotic Approach to Literary Translation Criticism

Abstract

[Abstract] Gayatri C. Spivak once mentions that the issues of humanist discourse find their expression in three interchangeable «concepts», namely, Language, World, and Consciousness. The world we are living in is invariably constituted by language and our consciousness is inexorably structured like anguage. We cannot possess Language, for we are at the same time manipulated by Language. Consequently, even Language is determined by World and Consciousness, the paradigm of Language encompasses the paradigms of World and Consciousness. Literature, featuring the undetectability or un-interpretability of truth as is opposed to the ultimate truth in other discourses, is also in the humanistic discourse. Literary translation criticism (LTC), as a theoretical criticism about literature, also consists of the three interchangeable concepts: World, Consciousness and Language. This thesis is to approach the issue of LTC from these three dimensions, while re-terming them as Contextual, Receptual and Textual dimensions respectively. World refers to the intercultural perspective of LTC, emphasizing the relativism between the contextuality in which translator and the translation exist and the selectivity of strategies the translator adopt influenced by it. Consciousness is the receptual part in LTC. It stresses the reception and processing of the aesthetic message happening in the consciousness of the reader, though the target reader’s participation is foregrounded by the translator’s maintenance and artistic/technical process of the original literary text. Language is the textual part of LTC. It problematizes different levels of linguistic issues from the original text to the translated literary texts. And it is in this sense that we can term this attempt as within a boarder domain of culture study for it sets the humanistic discourse paradigm as its departing point.