On The Phenomenon Of Retranslation From The Perspectives Of Reception Theory

In the translation of classics, it is a common phenomenon that different translators produce very different versions. However, traditional Chinese translation studies focus on the comparison between the original and translated texts and set standard for the translated version to be equivalent to the original text, which leads to the dream of producing a perfect translation for a particular literary work. Having observed the paradox between the traditional Chinese translation criterion and the retranslation phenomenon, the author of this thesis intends to explore the theoretical explanations for the phenomenon and necessity of retranslation.In literary criticism, reception theory marks a shift in concern from the author and the work to the text-reader relationship. The author of this thesis employs "horizon of expectations" and "indeterminacy" proposed by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, the two major representatives of the Constance School. According to Jauss, the horizon of expectations, refers to the partial and moving perspective of human experience and knowledge. There is pre-understanding or pre-knowledge structure in the reader's mind, before he/she sets out to read a new literary work. In literary translation, the differentiation in the horizon of expectations between the original text and the translator and the consideration for the readers' horizon of expectations definitely results in the diversity of translations. Iser claims that the literary work has two poles. The artistic pole, or the author's text, contains indeterminacies to be settled by the reader; the aesthetic pole, the reader's realization, means each individual reader's understanding of the literary work on the basis of his own knowledge and experiences. Each translator with his/her particular properties comes to the different concretization in the aesthetic pole for those indeterminacies in the artistic pole, hence the different interpretation of the original text.The author makes a detailed contrastive study of two widely-recognized English versions of Sun Tzu's The Art of War by Lionel Giles and Thomas Cleary. Instead of evaluating the gains and losses in the two versions, the author, employing the perspective of reception theory, focuses on the discussion of differences in the versions for the justification of the necessity of retranslation.