| In the translation history both at home and abroad, Lin Shu and Ezra Pound, as two influential translators, have a lot in common:Lin Shu knew no foreign languages and Ezra Pound had a faint knowledge of Chinese, but the two both translated a large number of literary works. From the traditional translation theory, which has focused on the comparison of source and target texts and has taken "faithfulness" or "equivalence" as the highest criterion, Pound’s and Lin Shu’s translations are unfaithful to the originals and are condemned by’some conservative critics due to their abundant treasons manifested as deletion, addition and adaptation in the translation. However, their translations were widely popular among the readers at that time. Then, we just wonder how their creative and treasonable translations could enjoy such a great popularity and significant influence. This has become a unique phenomenon in the field of translation studies.In the1960s, Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser put forward "reception aesthetics theory", focusing on "expectation horizon", which emphasizes the predominant position of target readers and their experience, directing the literary research from the "author-centered" and "work-centered" to the "reader-centered", thus providing a new perspective and a thinking mode for literary translation studies. Anyway, literary translation is not a merely transference of linguistic signs between two languages. Taking the core concept of "reader’s horizon of expectation" in reception aesthetics as its theoretical framework, this thesis tries to give the reason why Pound’s and Lin Shu’s translations which violated the principal principle of "faithfulness" in traditional translation theory to the maximum extent were widely accepted among readers and produced so great impacts.According to readers’horizon of expectations, readers are far different from each other with their own unique horizon of expectations and aesthetic standards, for they are independent individuals, and they are no longer regarded as a passive recipient but an active participant in accepting a literary work. Therefore, the translator should take the readers’role and expectation horizon into full consideration, since only when his/her translated product is understood and accepted by the intended readers can the value and significance of the translation be realized. In the thesis, taking Pound’s Cathay and Lin Shu’s Hei Nu Yu Tian Lu for example, the author attempts to justify that their creative treasons embodied by deletion, addition and adaptation are their efforts to respectively satisfy the intended readers’"innovatory expectation" and "directional expectation" from the two aspects, i.e. horizon of literary expectations and horizon of life expectations, in the given socio-cultural background at that time, thereby justifying inevitability and rationality of their creative treasons in literary translation beyond traditional linguistic level. |
