Reception And Creation: A Case Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of The Old Man And The Sea

Literary translation is different from many other types of translation: it requires translator both to re-illustrate the writer' s story, and to reproduce his/her style, tone, emotion. There have been various kinds of theories of translation put forward by both Chinese and Western scholars in history: Yan Fu' s faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance; Lin Yutang' s fidelity, mellifluence and aesthetic quality; Eugene A. Nida' s dynamic equivalence, Peter Newmark' s semantic or communicative approaches, etc. However, few of them take translator' s role into full consideration, that is, they centered more on the original text or the reader than translator' s role and practice in translating. In fact, translator is first a reader, receiving the original and digesting it with his/her own ideology, and then a translator. While he/she is translating, he/she will have his/her own way of interpreting the original as a kind of creation. Therefore, receiving and creating are two indispensable steps for translator to complete in translating. On the other hand, aesthetics of reception is a theory of literary criticism which emphasizes the dynamic role of the reader which used to be overlooked. The combination of aesthetics of reception and translation studies is quite beneficial to further study translations.Under the framework of aesthetics of reception, and combined with the two translators' translating strategies and translating thoughts, this thesis makes a comparative study of the two Chinese versions of The Old Man and the Sea from the perspective of its specific ideas of horizon of expectations, blanks left by the original writer and indeterminacies. Based on the study of this thesis, we can re-evaluate the translating process, and discover the negative and positive effects of the reader on accepting the original, which are brought about by the active participation of the translator. Meanwhile, there are respective advantages of different translators, which can become the stimuli to encourage more new translating versions. This thesis aims at providing a perspective that literary translation studies can refer to.