A Reader-response Perspective

The focus of literary studies has moved from the author to the text and then from the text to readers, and eventually converged to comprehensive studies. Similarly, the focus of translation studies, especially that of literary translation studies, has also been transferred from author-translator approaches to source-target texts and then to source-target readers. Compared with traditional translation studies, at present, more and more researchers advocate the reader-oriented theories in literary translation. They argue that the reader-response theory has more advantages and strong points in translation practice. This thesis intends to give a relatively detailed analysis of reader's response theory with the purpose of facilitating relevant studies in China.In Chapter One, a brief introduction of reader-response theory is made so as to make a survey of the theory and its background to show that the theory has exerted some influence in the field of translation. Chapter two discusses the development of reader-response theory. Chapter three focuses on the relationship between reader-response theory and translation and dynamic equivalence. Chapter four discusses the application of the theory in translation practice through examples. Each of the examples is typical for a situation discussed in the previous chapters. Chapter five pays close attention to some famous Chinese translation theorists concerning reader-response theory. Chapter Six draws a conclusion and gives a summary of the points discussed in the previous five chapters. Finally, an evaluation is made by the author in terms of contributions and limitations of this thesis.