A Comparative Study Of Three Chinese Versions Of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Oscar Wilde created fairy tales with beautiful language,rich imagination and ingenious style,reflecting his sympathy for the poor and his pursuit of truth,kindness and beauty.The authoress selected "The Happy Prince" and "The Nightingale and the Rose" from The Happy Prince and Other Stories and made a detailed analysis of their translations.In both works,Oscar Wilde captured the reader’s attention with his elegant and nuanced writing style,unconventional plots and themes.The lovable characters and quest for true love stood in stark contrast to the social ills of the Victorian capitalist society revealed in the story.The authoress chooses Xie Yujie,Ba Jin and Lin Huiyin’s translations as research objects.As a creator and translator of children literature,Xie presented a translation rich in childlike interest.Ba used direct and plain language.Lin’s translation showed the linguistic characteristics of her time.This thesis drew from Jauss’ s method "three-stages of reading" and applied the concepts of "horizon of expectations" and "implied reader" to make a comparative analysis.Through this study,the thesis aims to clarify how the readers’ reception influence the translations of the fairy tale,analyze the factors that affect readers’ reception,and provide some references for future fairy tale translation.Reception aesthetics puts the reader in the central position and emphasizes the role of the reader in the achievement of the value of literary works.Literary works gain meaning as they are read.Jauss’ s "horizon of expectations" and Iser’s "implied reader" are the core theories of reception aesthetics.This study introduced Jauss’ s methodology ’three stages of reading”(the horizon of aesthetic perception,the horizon of reflective interpretation and the horizon of historical application)into this comparative analysis of translations,hoping to grasp the overall meaning of the three translations from the shallow to the deep and from sensibility to rationality.In the first stage(the horizon of aesthetic perception),the thesis analyzes the linguistic features of the three translations from the perspective of modern children’s readers.The thesis found that Xie Yujie,as a writer and researcher of children’s literature,took into account the “horizon of expectations” of the child reader.Xie used explicitation,euphemism,four-syllable words,short sentences and parallelism to present a translation that meet the "horizon of expectations" of the child reader.Ba Jin’s version is direct and plain,but lacks vividness and there are some redundant quantifiers that do not conform to modern Chinese conventions.Lin Huiyin’s version is rich in language,but some words are no longer common in modern Chinese,which may cause trouble for children’s reading.Lin’s and Ba’s versions did not pay enough attention to the horizon of expectations of children.In the second stage(the horizon of reflective interpretation),based on the analysis in the first stage,the thesis interprets the reader reception of the three translations in the synchronic dimension from the perspectives of genre and theme.Xie’s translation has successfully reproduced the two major features of Wilde’s fairy tale: "adult" fairy tale and the theme of death.In the third stage(the horizon of historical application),based on the analysis of the previous two stages,the thesis combines reception aesthetics and polysystem theory to explain the different translations from the perspective of historical effects of the works,and analyzes the reception of Chinese versions of Wilde’s fairy tales from the perspective of the historical effect of the works in a diachronic dimension.Different literary systems in different times have different norms,and different translation strategies reflect translation norms in different cultural contexts.On the whole,the thesis believes that creators and translators of children literature should focus on the child reader’s “horizon of expectations”.While presenting translations that are interesting and understandable to the child reader,the translator shall also appropriately expand children’s “horizon of expectations”.Only such translation of fairy tales can make the child reader gain from reading them.