Children’s Literature Translation In The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics:a Comparison Of Two Chinese Versions Of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory

In recent decades, the theoretical studies of literature translation have made great progress. However, children’s literature translation, as a branch of literature translation, studies on it are insufficient. With frequent communication with foreign countries, translated works of children’s literature increase year by year in China, but on the other side, the overall quality is not high because translators tend to adapt the original work and use language and humor which suit adults. The development of children’s literature theories is unbalanced with its translation practices. It is urgent to carry out deep studies on children’s literature translation to provide theoretical guidance for its practice.This thesis aims to apply Reception Aesthetics to children’s literature translation to prove its accessibility and provide a wider research perspective of this field. Based on Reception Aesthetics which includes four main ideas, i.e. role of readers, horizon of expectations, aesthetic distance and indeterminacy of the text, this thesis chooses the two representative Chinese versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a famous children’s literature work written by Roald Dahl. By combining Reception Aesthetics with the translated works, the thesis makes a comparative study of these two Chinese versions from linguistic level, rhetorical level and cultural level and gives suggestive tactics for children’s literature translation, namely, translators should adopt colloquial linguistic style, simplify sentence patterns, visualize expressions and use certain strategies to reduce cultural gaps. This thesis does not aim to make a judgment about which one is better, the author hopes to promote the future development of practices and theories of children’s literature translation.After comparatively analyzing the work based on Reception Aesthetics, this thesis draws the conclusion:translators must be child-oriented when translating children’s literature works. Only those translated versions which get readers involved in reading are good translated works. They achieve the communication between translators and original works, as well as achieving the communication between the translated works and target readers.