Reception Aesthetics And Translator's Subjectivity: A Case Study Of Moment In Peking

As a major means of cultural exchange and transmission, translation has become increasingly significant in the trend of closer international communication, in which the translator plays undoubtedly an active and important role. Traditional translation studies lay emphasis on the source-oriented theories, thus the translator has always been in a marginalized and neglected cultural status. With the "cultural turn" of translation studies in 1970s, more attention has been given to the translator and translator's subjectivity becomes a heated topic among the translation theoreticians recently. On the other hand, Reception Aesthetics, turning the previous author-oriented and text-oriented paradigms in translation studies into a reader-oriented paradigm, emphasizes the indeterminacy of text meaning and reader's active participation in the meaning construction, which provides a new perspective for the translation studies.This thesis tries to integrate Reception Aesthetics and translator's subjectivity to compare the two Chinese versions of Lin Yutang's Moment in Peking. Through analyzing the differences and features in the two versions, the factors which influence the translator's translation are discussed. A brief introduction of the English novel and its author, translators and their translations as well as the previous studies toward the novel and its translations is given as a foundation for the whole thesis to start with. Then the main concepts and developments of Reception Aesthetics and translator's subjectivity and the studies of those theories both at home and abroad are illustrated. Though Reception Aesthetics and translator's subjectivity have implications to literary translation, they have certain limitations within themselves. Therefore, the writer of this thesis integrates the theories as a theoretical framework with the comparison of two Chinese versions of Moment in Peking as a case study to explore the reasons that different translators come up with different versions of the same receptor language for the same literary works. This thesis chooses Zhang Zhenyu's and Yu Fei's versions as data and analyzes them from the translator's translating strategy, cultural awareness and style, hoping to facilitate the translation and comparison of Moment in Peking in future. This thesis also analyzes the factors leading to mistranslations, making it clear that translator should deeply study the social historical environment of the source text and take target language readers'thinking mode and aesthetic demand into consideration.Finally, this thesis points out that these two translators of Moment in Peking have their distinct features in translation. Zhang Zhenyu shows better language competence and skillful translating strategy, while Yu Fei does well in reconstructing the cultural elements, being faithful to the original meaning and style. During the translating process, the translator should first understand fully the source text to achieve fusion of horizons with the author, concretizing "spots of indeterminacy" or "blanks" contained in the source text. Then, the translator should take the target readers'reception level and aesthetic demands into consideration and strive to get fusion of horizons with the target readers. Only through this, can the translator reproduce the meaning and style of the original text. The thesis ends with the conclusion that it is theoretically and practically meaningful to integrate Reception Aesthetics and translator's subjectivity to the analysis of literary translation.