On The English Translation Of Shih Ching From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

The thesis, from the perspective of Reception Aesthetics, makes a deep study on the four English versions of Shih Ching. Under the influence of the author-centered paradigm and the text-centered paradigm in literary research, the traditional translation criticism mainly adopted the criteria of faithfulness and equivalence etc. to make a static, isolated comparison among different versions, the purpose of which was to select an authorized version, completely faithful to the original author and the original work. Such kind of research ignored the translator's initiative and creativity, and depreciated many translated versions' value. According to Reception Aesthetics, the literary work is an uncompleted, many-layered schematized formation full of blanks and indeterminate places. The meaning of literary works lies in the reader's concretization and the literary research should turn its attention to the reader's reception and interpretation. As for the application of Reception Aesthetics into the translation study, the emphasis will be laid on the translator's initiative and creativity during the translation process, which will free the translator from the slavery in the traditional view and make the translator the coauthor of literary works, enjoying the same status as the original author. When Reception Aesthetics is applied to the analysis of the English versions of Shih Ching, the translator's subjectivity and creativity will be recognized favorably and each version will obtain a fair and reasonable evaluation. The thesis probes into the four translators' translating process from two angles, namely, horizon of expectations and indeterminacy of literary works. At first, it mainly expounds the four translators' horizons of expectations as well as the embodiment of them in the translated versions. Then a comparison is made among the four English versions so as to investigate how the four translators dealt with the places of indeterminacy and blanks in Shih Ching. It was found that the four translators concretized the indeterminate spots on the basis of their own horizon of expectations. During this process, they made the most of their initiative and creativity and actively involved themselves in the reconstruction of the original work. Consequently, the English versions were the product of their concretizations and in a sense, they became the coauthors of Shih Ching. Meanwhile, Shih Ching as literary works, involves the ample semantic potential. The meaning of the whole anthology varies from individual to individual embedded in a certain socio-historical background, and thus it is necessary to come up with a lot more versions in the future to successively unfold its ample semantic potential.