At 2:00 p.m. on June 5th, Professor Theo Hermans of UCL (University College London, UK), one of the founders of translation studies and a UNESCO subject-reviewing expert, held an academic lecture titled Positioning Translators in the academic lecture hall of 111 of the College of Foreign Languages.
The lecture was hosted by Professor Miao Ju, Director of the Centre for Translation Studies and PhD supervisor. Associate Professor Li Jing and Ms. Li Jingjing as the representatives of the Center for Translation Studies were present, and postgraduates and doctors of the College also attended the lecture. Even some of the post-graduate at Tianjin Foreign Studies University and Tianjin University of Finance and Economics heard the news and specially came to listen to the lecture.
Professor Hermans analyzes the differences between the original texts and their translations with a unique perspective and elaborated the translator's positions. At the beginning of the lecture, he used some examples of translations to show how translators used different methods in their translations to imply their disagreement with the views in the original texts. This type of translation was like a discordant narration in narratology—a narration in which the author’s view was clearly different from that of the narrator. Based on this, he proposed the concept of discordant translation, in which the translator's own point of view was different from that of the author. Translation was like a reported speech, which meant that the translator was the reporter, his or her attitude related to the translation content and the translation content embedded in the translator's speech. The translator was not only an intermediary between the author and the target language readers. When translating, the translator's attitude would be reflected through his or her approach to the work (such as wording, language conversion, tone adjustment, etc.). Finally, Professor Hermans used Lin Shu's translation as an example to illustrate the phenomenon of re-contextualisation of translation and the local narrative of translator Lin Shu from the perspective of social-narrative to help identify and understand the translator's position.