Retranslation Observed From The View Of Reception Theory

Traditional translation studies focus mainly on comparison between source text and target text; while far less effort has been made to study the translation process itself, let alone translators and readers' role within it. From the perspective of reception theory, this paper takes a closer look at translators' activities, readers' needs and horizon of expectations' influence on translation and the necessity of retranslation.Reception theory marks a shift in concern from the author and the original to the target reader relationship. The author of this thesis mainly employs "horizon of expectations" proposed by Hans Robert Jauss, one of the 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 and pre-knowledge structure in the readers' mind, before he sets out to read a new literary work. Horizon of expectations is anything but static, it changes as the time goes by. 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 inevitably results in the diversity of translations.The author makes a detailed contrastive study of the two widely-recognized Chinese versions of Thomas Hardy's Tess of d'Urbervilles by Zhang Guruo and Sun Fali. Instead of evaluating gains and losses in the two versions, the author, from the view of reception theory, focuses the discussion on differences in the versions for the justification of the necessity of retranslation.The paper is divided into four chapters, the first of which is literature review. In this part, the author introduce to the reader reception theory, including the definition, influence, and several representatives and their ideas.Chapter two discusses the other key word—retranslation, whose purpose is to provide theoretical explanation and views toward it for further study.