A Case Study On Translation Of Classical Chinese Poetry From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Being a special type of art, verse translation, to some extent, is in agreement with literary creation, yet it has its own aesthetic features in light of the properties of Chinese and English poetry, and artistic skills adopted vary due to different translation schools and translators. This thesis is a tentative study to explore verse translation in light of Reception Theory, with a view to better understanding of the activity of translation from the point of view of target readers, and thus shedding light on translation and providing practical guidance for classical Chinese verse translation.This thesis probes into related verse translation literature in which similarities and differences of aesthetic features in Chinese and English poetry are demonstrated and compared, including the beauty in sound, form and sense. Meanwhile, Reception Theory is introduced and adopted in this paper as a means to examine the translations of classical Chinese poetry. As a new perspective on translation, Reception Theory comes forward with a series of concepts such as horizons of expectation, indeterminacy, concretization and readers’role and status. It changes the text-centered theory into the reader-centered model. These two theoretical studies lay a solid foundation for the next step of research.The research approach adopted here is a combination of the descriptive method and the quantitative method, and thus the following part presents a comparative survey conducted to investigate and analyze the transference of poetry aesthetic aspects and in addition, evaluate different translators’versions of three selected poems by means of a questionnaire. On the basis of this survey, the last part of this thesis illustrates the application of Reception Theory to the translation of classical Chinese poetry and the implications concluded from this study.The implications are as follows:First, as to the transference of beauty, translators should effectively minimize the basic difference in "horizons of expectation" between Chinese readers and target readers. Liberal translation is suggested rather than literal translation, which may endow a new life to images of the original poems and makes it easier for the target readers to understand and appreciate. Second, translators should constantly respect the reception of target readers so that they can bridge the cultural divide while translating the literary text. The key to a successful translation lies in the fact that translators keep his readers in mind and reproduce the original spirit with the perfect language. In addition, the joint efforts of the Chinese translators and western translators are more likely to bring about the most successful translation. Chinese translators rank the second and western translators the third. However, the works of cooperative and Chinese translators are not easily available in the book market in English-speaking countries, which hinder effective dissemination of classical literature, including Chinese poetry, in English-speaking countries.