Translation Criticism And Reader's Response

Responsible and efficient literary translation criticism should be objective, dialectic and dynamic, but this aim will never be fully achieved if the reader's participation is ignored. Among the various existing notions on the criteria or the methods of translation criticism, only a few take account of reader's response. And even for those that based on the reader's response, for example, Eugene A. Nida's "Dynamic Equivalence", do not further discuss how to judge whether the equivalence was achieved. This thesis proposes an " improved" dynamic model named "Dynamic Interactive Equivalence" and demonstrated the principal role that reader's response plays in translation criticism from the cognition perspective. Starting with analyzing the cognitive nature of translating, this thesis firstly points out that reader's reading is also a psychological cognitive process, which at the same time illustrates the comparability of the source text reader's schemata and the target text reader's schemata which were produced while reading the source text and the target text respectively. If the target reader's response to the target text is dynamic interactive equivalent to the original reader's response to the source text, then the translation can be regarded to be successful. But the reliability of the reader's response based "Dynamic Interactive Equivalence" 's is secured by the comparison, analyzing and statistic study of the collected data of reader's response. Therefore, this thesis takes one paragraph from the Chinese classical novel The Dream of Red Mansions and its English version as the example, compared and analyzed the English-speaking reader's response to the English version and native Chinese reader's response to the original text, and successfully demonstrated the applicability and efficiency of the "Dynamic Interactive Equivalence" in translation criticism.