A Comparison Of Xiao Qian's Self-translations And Other Translations From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

The twentieth century was called the "age of translation". But compared with theoverwhelming prosperity of the whole translation studies, the studies ofself-translation receive an increasing attention only in recent years abroad, and thestudies in this research field in China are scarce, though we do have excellentself-translators.The "initial norm" in translation decides whether the translator adopts adequateor acceptable translation strategies. Having read some of the famous writer andtranslator Xiao Qian's self-translations and his other translations, the author of thisthesis discovers that Xiao Qian tends to employ acceptable translation strategy inthese two kinds of translations. Interestingly, when there are comparatively fewervariances in his translations of the others' works, he does introduce many changes tohis self-translations, not only in words, sentences, paragraphs, but also in contents.This thesis tries to describe those differences from the perspective of ReceptionAesthetics, which is an approach of literary criticism, including "reception studies"and "effect studies". According to Reception Aesthetics, the text is an appealingstructure, and the reader actively participates with his horizon of expectations inreading, actualizing one potential meaning of the text. This thesis intends to employsome of its key concepts, such as horizon of expectations, aesthetics distance,appealing structure of the text and concretization, in describing the differencesexhibiting in Xiao Qian's two kinds of translations. It is found that Xiao Qianconcerns much about the reader's horizon of expectation and tries to concretize theimplicit information in both of these two kinds of translations, however, in hisself-translations, he introduces great changes to meet the demand of the reader.Furthermore, besides concretizing some implicit information in his self-translations,he adds a lot of other necessary information.There are many causes of those differences, and this thesis intends to proposethree causes. Firstly, in the stage of "analysis" in translation, the self-translator makes less or almost no efforts in analyzing his own works. Secondly, in translation, thetranslator is constrained by the interaction of the writer's world, the reader's worldand his own world, while the self-translator is constrained by the reader's and his ownworld. Therefore, the self-translator can concern more about the reader. Thirdly, theself-translator is driven by the "self-perfection" needs. These three causes integrate toenable the self-translator to enjoy more freedom and be equipped with a stronger needto introduce changes to the source text in translation.After the discussions on the differences and the main causes, the author of thisthesis points out the implications for translation. Firstly, the translator is constrainedby his own horizon of expectations as well as many other constrains, therefore, onlydifferent translations can nearly fully interpret the source text. Moreover,retranslations are necessary since the reader's horizon of expectations is changingalong with the time. Secondly, self-translations have more characteristics of creationrather than that of translation. Thirdly, translators can introduce some changes to thesource text for the good of the text.It is a novel try of this thesis to describe the differences in the translator'sself-translation and his translation of the other's works and explore into the causes ofthe differences, therefore, there must be many defects. Nevertheless, the author of thisthesis only hopes that in the near future, more and more people will conductresearches into the field of self-translation.