A Report On The Translation Of Mistress Pat From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

As a saying goes,"A thousand readers make a thousand Hamlets". There is a growing tendency to believe that it is the reader that decides the meaning of the literary text. The Reception Aesthetics, which underlines the determinate role of the reader, is also illuminating literary translation in modern times.Mistress Pat is a novel written for children by the famous Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery. The author of this paper has finished the translation task for its first part. Based on the translation practice under the enlightenment of the Reception Aesthetics, this report gives a brief introduction to the translation task and the target reader, and expounds the essential elements of the theory, its enlightenment on literary translation and the reasons for applying it to the translation of Mistress Pat. Through the case analysis, Chapter Three and Chapter Four illustrate how this reader-oriented theory is employed to handle the difficulties in the literary translation process, namely, the translation of conversation, especially the Irish cook Judy’s dialect, and the translation of the account of the natural beauty. Standard Chinese is adopted to cope with the dialect. Personalization Principle, Colloquial Principle and Coherence Principle are proposed to handle the conversation translation. And the stylistic features in the environmental description are preserved to give readers aesthetic pleasure unless the target reader finds it so hard to digest in the Chinese language that interpretative method is required. The paper also points out the theory’s limitations found in practice and reflects on how to carry out the project in a better way.It is hoped that this report may throw light upon how the Reception Theory steers the translator to the right place where he should be and attract more attention to the guiding role of the Reception Theory in literary translation practice.