A Research On Readers' Reception Of Stephen Mitchell's English Translation Of Dao De Jing

In the history of translation,much attention has been paid to the relationship between the original text and its translation.Thus,discussions on "faithfulness", "liberal translation vs.literary translation","domestication vs.foreignization" etc, have attracted many eyes,and become the foci of translation studies,while the target readers,as the consumers of the final product-the translated work,have been overlooked for quite a long time.The readers are very important for fulfilling the main task of translation-intercultural communication,so the author of this present thesis has decided to study readers' reception of a translated work,which is meaningful for the spreading of Chinese culture in the world.Dao De Jing,as "the most popular and most frequently translated work of Chinese thought"(Moss,2001:9),has more than 40 versions in English alone,so it is a typical work for the study of readers' reception.Then why does the author choose Stephen Mitchell's translation as a case? Because it has a large circulation and the author has collected 176 readers' reviews about this version,which are valuable for studying readers' reception.The author has integrated reception theory,and audience analysis of communication science,in this thesis.The representatives of reception theory are Jauss and Iser,whose "horizon of expectations" and " inviting structures" are meaningful in studying readers' reception.Jauss' theory of "aesthetic pleasure" is also employed in this thesis to study the readers' motives.However,reception theory is a literary theory,which confines its study within the literary text.To make it fit for studying the translated works the author proposes that the reception of a translation should consist of the text reception and the translation reception.The text reception is readers' reception of the translation as a text,including its themes,its writing skills, its style,its thoughts,and so on;the translation reception is the readers' reception of the text as a translated work,mainly about the quality of the translation,the qualifications of the translator,and the transformations and mistakes in the translation. In this way,reception theory is adapted to translation studies.The audience analysis of communication science is used here to study readers' types,motives,and selections.Through examining the 176 real readers' reviews (http://www.amazon.com),the author makes a classification of four opposing groups of readers of Stephen Mitchell's version of Dao De Jing in Chapter 2:the well-informed reader and the under-informed reader;the serious reader and the practical reader;the closed reader and the open reader;the author's reader,the translator's reader,and the author and the translator's reader.These classifications can comprehensively describe readers' reception.The main body of this thesis consists of three chapters.In Chapter 1,the author first introduces the theoretical framework of this thesis and then makes a literature review of reception theory,the audience analysis of communication science,and some representative opinions about readers' reception both in translation history,and in the history of the translation of Dao De Jing and its research,and also makes a literature review of Stephen Mitchell's translation of Dao De Jing in particular.In Chapter 2, the author focuses on the translation reception of Mitchell's translation,that is,the reception of Mitchell's version as a translated work.The readers' 176 reviews containing their criticism of the translator's qualifications as a translator,his attitudes towards his work,his writing skills and gifts,his translation strategies and opinions, and the quality of his translation form the core of this chapter and this thesis.By analyzing these reviews,the author makes some classifications of these readers' types and reading motives,and correspondingly their reception and selection in reading Mitchell's translation.In Chapter 3,the author studies the text reception of Mitchell's translation,that is,the reception of his translation as a text-as a literary book and as a wisdom book.The author aims at probing the reasons for the popularity of Mitchell's translation.Through the study of Mitchell's translation of Dao De Jing and its 176 reviews, a conclusion is reached that the reception of a translated work should be evaluated from two aspects:the quality and quantity of the original information preserved in the translation and the popularity of the translation,that the literal scholar translation and the popular free translation both play important roles in bettering the reception of the translation of Dao De Jing in the west,that readers of different types have different motives and needs in reading,and therefore it's reasonable for Dao De jing to have more than one version,and that there is a tendency of the increasing use of foreignization in translation with the growth of communication between different cultures.