Cognitive Contrastive Study on Translator's Subjectivity

This study aims to investigate realizations and manifestations of the translator's subjectivity in two translated versions of TheSecret Garden, written by Francis Hodgson Burnett, an American children's literature writer.WordSmith 6.0 was used to make a self-built corpus to explore the subjectivity of Li Wenjun and Huang Jianren.The realizations and manifestations were explored at three levels: lexical level, sentence level, and textual level.The type/token ratio and the mean sentence length were calculated, and the logicality and coherence of the discourse were analyzed to contrast the two versions. The findings show that the translator's subjectivity is mainly manifested in language habits, different choices of translation strategy, and the aesthetic of the translator. In these two Chinese versions of The Secret Garden: (1) Huang tended to use concise words, while Li was good at using four-character words. (2) Huang was inclined to utilize the foreignization translation strategy, while Li was for domestication. (3) Li was skilled in using reduplicated words to highlight the beauty of rhyme, while Huang was adept at using simple and easy-to-understand words, showing the beauty of simplicity. Significant differences were observed in high-frequency words, modal particles, and conjunctive words by Chi-square test. The study facilitates a deeper understanding of how the translator's subjectivity presents and mines the main factors behind its manifestations: social background, diverse personal experiences, and translators' different understandings of the aesthetic. These differences draw a point whereby the translator's subjectivity is unquestionably the most influential factor while translating.