A Comparative Study Of The Three Chinese Versions Of Gulliver's Travels From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

Gulliver's Travels, known as an excellent satirical novel, is the masterpiece of the great English prose satirist Jonathan Swift. Since it was introduced to China at the end of the 19th century, it has received great attention. And as time goes by, it seems that the satirical work gradually developed into a children's work. Based on the fact, the author of this paper had great interest in the translations of Gulliver's Travels, and attempted to study them from the perspective of reception theory.As a new methodology of literary theories, reception theory (also called reception aesthetics) emerged in the 1960's in Germany and marked a shift in concern from the author and the work to the text-reader relationship in literary criticism. The author of this paper is going to employ two important concepts in reception theory, namely, "horizon of expectation" and "indeterminacy", to lay out her discussion. "Horizon of expectation" refers to the dynamic accumulation of human experience and knowledge, which keeps changing as time goes by and society develops. Moreover, readers'reaction is a criterion for judging the quality and value of a literary work. Therefore, in the process of creating a literary work, the author needs to take the readers'horizon of expectation into consideration. In addition, the theory holds the idea that a literary work does not present all information to readers. Instead, it contains many spots of indeterminacy which establish a bridge between the work and the readers and need the readers to explain and concretize in accordance with their own understanding, experience and imagination. Only in this way can a literary work as an artistic entity be completed and realize its ideological connotation and aesthetic value.In this thesis, the author chooses three Chinese versions of Gulliver's Travels which appeared in different historical periods to do a case study. With the help of the two concepts of "horizon of expectation" and "indeterminacy" in reception theory, she analyzes some examples from the three Chinese versions and simply introduces the reception of the three versions. By analyzing, we know that the three translators have different "horizon of expectation" for their different historical and cultural backgrounds; moreover, the target readers of the three versions also have their own "horizon of expectation" and receptivity. In view of the above two aspects, the three translators make different concretizations for those spots of indeterminacy, and different translations come into being.Instead of evaluating the gains and losses in the three versions of Gulliver's Travels, the thesis only intends to show that readers living in different times have different "horizon of expectation" and concretizations of indeterminacy, and that one version of Gulliver's Travels can not satisfy.the need of every reader in every period.