"self" Reconstruction In David Pollard's English Translation Of Chinese Essays

With the trend of globalization and the development of culture, the cross-cultural and translation researches have bloomed all over the world and in the field of literature translation, this kind of research has gone wide and far. However, not as poetry and fiction translation, which have been studied for a long time and much progress has been reached, the essay translation research has not been systematicly and comprehensively developed. The turth is, essay has long existed in the Chinese literature, constituting as an essential part of it, so that the essay translation research has great importance for the promotion of Chinese culture and development of Sino-foreign culture interaction. The traditional origina author-centered or text-centered approaches of essay translation, although has made some achievement in this area, ignore the other participants in the translation process, i.e., the readers.According to the above-mentioned, this thesis chooses David Pollard's translation antholgoy The Chinese Essay as a sample to research the English translation of Chinese essays, using the reception theory.David Pollard is an outstanding scholar, translator and researcher of Chinese literature, his The Chinese Essay is a translation book as well as a research book, including most of the classics of Chinese essays from ancient to temporary times. Both the inclusiveness of content and the high quality of translation text make this book a good choice as a sample for Chinese essay translation research.Reception theory was developed by Jauss and Iser from hermeneutic, whose focus is on the importance of "Reader reception" and "Reader horizon" to the literature research. According to reception theory, the works are unfulfilled even after produced by the authors, and their real value will be realized through the consumption of the readers. The reception theory connects mankind and text, which is not only a great progress for literature research but also points a new direction for literature translation. In the process of literature translation, the original author, the translator, the potential readers are all involved, and both the original texts and the translated texts are included, these participants are ignored by the traditional research approaches. To the opposite, the reception theory will consider the roles of all the participants and the relationship between them.Besides, "self-expression" is the aesthesis quality as well as the biggest characteristic of Chinese essay, which distinguishes it with other literary categories like poetry, fiction and dramas. The discovery of "self-expression" as Chinese essay's aesthesis quality is essential for studying the nature of essay translation. Therefore, during using reception theory to research the essay translation, this thesis at the same time studies the significance of "self" construction and reconstruction at the levels of the original authors, the translator and the potential readers, from the aspects of culture, temperament and imagery state, etc., trying to understand and illustrate the Chinese essay translation comprehensively and systematically.Based on the analysis in this thesis, it is found that the Chinese essay writers have constructed "selves" in their works, to express their true inner-heart world and life experience to readers. In the process of translating these essays, David Pollard had to understand and reconstruct the original authors'"selves":On the one hand, he had to be a loyal translator, who would honestly reconstruct the original authors' diversified "selves", satisfying the "horizon of expectation" of the original texts' potential readers; on the other hand, he had to write beautiful and fluent English texts to meet the needs of the translated texts'potential readers, so that, this group of readers can correctly and completely understand the original authors'"selves" through reading the translated texts, and achieve a "fusion of vision" with them.The combination of "self" reconstruction and reception theory in the Chinese essay translation research has the innovative meaning, which provides a new view for open application of reception theory, further and widely develops the essay translation approches, and invokes people's thinking on the Chinese essay translation as well.