A Study Of The C-E Translation Of Traditional Chinese Cultural Classics Based On Reception Aesthetics

Traditional Chinese cultural classics are one of the most significant carriers of Chinese traditional culture,which carry the history and spirit of Chinese culture.With increasingly prosperous cultural exchanges today,the translation of these classics plays an exceedingly important role in developing and disseminating traditional Chinese culture,strengthening cultural soft power of our country and enabling our country to better reach out to the world.In the history of the development of Chinese culture,many famous figures have put forward unique ideas,which have achieved a dominant position in the history of Chinese traditional culture,and have left a precious cultural legacy for human society.Chinese culture contains the thoughts of Confucianism,and Mencius is no doubt one of the most outstanding core figures in Confucianism.The book Mencius collects Mencius’ thoughts and remarks,and its ideological,cultural and literary characteristics have determined its historical status in the classics of traditional Chinese culture.Therefore,under the background of “going out” of Chinese culture,the translation of Mencius,as one of the representative books of traditional Chinese cultural classics,can make an important contribution to the dissemination of Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture.This paper attempts to analyze the C-E translation of traditional Chinese cultural classics on the theoretical basis of reception aesthetics.Most of the traditional translation theories focus on the translated text and the author,but less on the readers.Reception aesthetics theory,as an emerging theory in the domain of literature research rising in the 1960 s,gives much attention to the position and effects of readers in literary diffusion.With readers as the centre and readers’ acceptance as the goal,the theory of reception aesthetics provides a different theoretical basis and guidance for literary translations.This theory pays much attention to the active position and positive role of readers in the whole process of translation.The readers of the English versions of traditional Chinese cultural texts are mainly foreign readers,while Chinese and Western readers have differences in traditional customs,lifestyles,thinking modes and values,and have different requirements for reading texts.Therefore,if translators pay enough attention to these differences in translation,foreign readers can better understand and accept traditional Chinese culture.The aim of this paper is to reveal the role of the theory of reception aesthetics in the C-E translation of traditional Chinese cultural classics in terms of the special characteristics of foreign readers and Chinese traditional cultural texts,as well as the exercise of the acceptance aesthetics theory in the translation of ancient Chinese classical books.Based on the theory of receptive aesthetics,this thesis tries to analyze and discuss the English version of Mencius by James Legge in terms of the distinguishing features of traditional Chinese cultural texts and their translation,and thus obtains enlightenment of the reception aesthetics theory on the English translation of traditional Chinese cultural classics.The theme of this paper is to reveal that when translating traditional Chinese cultural texts,translators could,under the guidance of the theory of reception aesthetics,take into account target language readers’ habits of expression and patterns of thinking while reflecting writers’ writing purpose of the source text,so that their translation can better convey the ideas and the cultural connotations that contained in the original text.