A Study Of The English Version Of Honggaoliang From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Reception Aesthetics, as a literary theory, emerged in the 1960 s in Germany and started to be applied in translation field in the late 1970 s. Its main representatives are Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. It gets rid of the traditional author-oriented or text-oriented literary aesthetics and connects writers, works and readers through the horizon of expectation. Different from other translation theories, Reception Aesthetics emphasizes the importance of the readers. In the framework of Reception Aesthetics, this thesis carries out a systematically comparative analysis of Honggaoliang written by Mo Yan and its English version Red Sorghum translated by Howard Goldblatt.Based on the two aspects of horizon of expectation, the directional expectation and the innovative expectation, the thesis comparatively analyzes Honggaoliang and its English version Red Sorghum from three levels, the word level, the syntactic level and the textual level. Ant it tries to explore the influential factors of the target readers for the translated text and manifest how the translators choose the effective translation strategies and methods from the perspective of horizon of expectation. The thesis generalizes the domestication and the foreignization translation strategies and three main translation methods, including addition, omission and substitution. It is found that the translators should consider the horizons of expectation of the target readers in order to accurately present the directional expectation and the innovative expectation in translation. In the process of translation, if the translators want to combine the directional expectation and the innovative expectation, they not only need to manipulate the two translation strategies at a macro level, but also need to adopt the assistant translation methods at a micro level. It is hoped that this thesis could provide some help and broaden the viewpoint for the following study of Red Sorghum and offer some references for the relative study in this field.