The Study Of Yang Bi's Chinese Version Of Vanity Fair From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

William Makepeace Thackeray is one of the outstanding critical realistic writers in the 19th century in Britain. His great reputation owes most to the publication of his masterpiece Vanity Fair. Characterized by vivid reproduction of the original style, Yang Bi's version is well accepted among contemporary Chinese readers as well as in the translators'circle.Lots of translation researchers all agree that Yang Bi's version sheds great enlightenment on Chinese literary translation both in linguistic and stylistic levels. However, there is almost no research that aims at the two aspects:the translator as the reader of the source text and the reader's active participation. Given Yang Bi's successful translation and limitations of previous researches, it's necessary and rewarding to study it from the perspective of Reception Aesthetics.This thesis finds its theoretical foundation in Reception Aesthetics for the study of literary translation. The theory of Reception Aesthetics puts great stress on the active role of the reader in the process of literary reception. It gives great respect to the reader with emphasis on his/her function in constructing the meaning of a literary work, allowing researchers to study the reception process of translated literary works from a dialectic perspective. The reader usually enters the reading process with his/her own horizon of expectations formed in previous reading and life experiences. The reader's aesthetic expectation inevitably influences the translator's translation activity. The translator, as the reader of the source text, first reads with his own horizon of expectations.However, his concretization is bound to be confined by the target readers'horizon of expectations.The present thesis consists of six parts.The introduction part is a general account of the significance, approach and overall structure of the thesis.The second chapter is literature review. The writer looks back on the previous studies about Yang Bi's version of Vanity Fair, and then analyzes their limitations respectively from the linguistic and cultural perspectives.Finally the theory of Reception Aesthetics is introduced for further study. The third chapter adopts Reception Aesthetics Theory as the theoretical framework for the present research. In chapter four, the writer first analyzes Chinese readers'horizon of expectations in the mid-twentieth century. Then Yang Bi's version is analyzed in linguistic and stylistic levels for examining the process of her concretization. Chapter five explores two practicable principles to improve the acceptability of translated works. In the ending part, the writer reaches two conclusions:on the one hand, the translator should consider the target reader's horizon of expectations of his time; on the other hand, during the concretization process, it's advisable for the translator to abide by two translation principles in terms of treatment of indeterminacies:preservation principle or compensation principle. In other words, the translator should try to strike an appropriate balance between his creative concretization and reconstruction of the readers'horizon of expectations. As a matter of fact, such a balance involving many factors is hard to manipulate but still rewarding to further explore in the future.