On The Translator's Consciousness Of The Receptors In Children's Literature Translation

This paper makes a study on children's literature translation with focus on the translator's consciousness of the receptors.When translators render children's literary works, they usually adopt the angle of adult's appreciation level and aesthetic taste and ignore children's psychological characteristics, range of knowledge and reception level. The author makes the exploration on the aesthetics of reception (the reception theory), which may provide a completely new perspective for children's literature translation. Reception theory raises reader-centered paradigm and entrusts readers with a sublime status. From the perspective of reception theory, the reader's reception process of a text is an essential way of the real realization of the text. Literary works are produced for readers, who are no longer seen as marginal elements in reading process. In the triangle of author, work, and reader the last is no longer a passive part, but rather itself a dynamic ingredient of history. The historical life of a literary work is unthinkable without the active participation of the addressees. The fusion of horizons is a cardinal principle of the reception theory. Only when reader's horizon merges with the literary text can reception and understanding be reached. The horizon-of-expectation includes ideological ideas, moral concepts, aesthetic taste, intuitional ability, reception level and so on.Children's literature, as a branch of literature, shares the common characteristics of literature and yet bears its own distinctive features. The content and form of children's literary works need to be widely accepted and easily understood. With children as the target readership, the translator should take children's psychological characteristics, cultural knowledge, personal experiences, aesthetic taste, reading habits and reception level, etc. into consideration.This paper makes a tentative analysis of two translated versions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the angles of words, sentences, and cultural differences. It shows that good translations of children's literary works depend on the translators' consciousness of the receptors. Children's literature is to serve its readers, so the leading position of readers decides what actual translation method the translator has to choose. Inspired by the reception theory, when we translate for children, children should be taken seriously as the future readers of the translation. The author hopes that this paper could do something useful for children's literature translation and adult translators could hear the voice of children to translate more and more interesting books for them.