On The Multiplicity Of Versions In Literary Translation: A Reception-Theoretic Perspective

As an indispensable communication tool between two cultures, thetranslation practice has a task to transfer logical information and artisticimages, as intact as possible, from the original language to the target one.It is a common phenomenon that different translators often producedifferent translations based on the same text. Especially in literarytranslation, people always notice the existence of multiple versions of thesame masterpiece. Obviously, it is neither a waste of resources nor just asimple repetition. Literary translation is a creative activity concerningboth logical and aesthetic issues. Due to its resemblance to translationstudies in research object and academic domain, reception theory, whichwas originally considered a methodological branch in literature research,was also introduced into translation studies.Opposite to traditional translation studies which focus on pursuingthe standard translation and the equivalence between the original text andthe target text, reception theory puts great emphasis on the text-readerrelationship and the readers' initiative. According to reception theory, it isthrough the reading process that a literary text becomes a literature work.To the same literary text, different readers usually have various aestheticexpectations, known as horizon of expectations, which is mainly determined by their social experiences, aesthetic tendencies andacceptability. Furthermore, the author's text contains blanks andindeterminacies to be settled by the readers. In this way, the readers canplay an active role in the realization of a text, and make a literary worklivelier.In literary translation, each individual translator as a reader has hisown horizon of expectations and explanation to the indeterminacies dueto his pre-knowledge in mind. Then the translator has to examine histranslation from the perspective of the potential readers to achieve thefusion of horizons hence the existence of multiple versions.Sister Carrie, which was published in 1900 as Theodore Dreiser'sfirst novel, was the first important work describing the metropolitan lifein America in modern literature history. Because of the theme whichproposed a completely new ideology contradicting to the traditionalmoral of frugality and self-control, the publication of Sister Carrieencountered unexpected obstacles. In this thesis, from the perspective ofreception theory, the author chooses four Chinese translations of SisterCarrie based on its two English versions and analyzes some examplesfrom these translations to show that owing to the different cultural andideological backgrounds, different translators give their translationsdifferent standpoints and language features, and they also make distinctconcretizations of the indeterminacies in the original text hence produce different translations. The aim of this comparative study is to indicate thata single translation can never satisfy different readers in different times.Only by producing different translations can people gradually get closerand closer to the soul of the original work.