A Study On Yang Hsien-yi And Gladys Yang’s Selections From Records Of The Historian From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

Shi Ji, the first annal and biography general history in China, after its completion,has enjoyed immense popularity among Chinese people. It has been translated intodifferent languages and thus introduced to the foreigners. Among its Englishtranslations, the most influential ones include Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang’s version,Burton Watson’ version and Nienhauser’s version. Yang’s version is the first Englishtranslation that is completed by a Chinese as the main translator. However, domesticresearch on Shi Ji’s translation is quite scarce, let alone Yang Hsien-yi and GladysYang’s Selections from Records of the Historian. It has not received due attention.Research on its translation features and strategies is evidently of instructive significancefor the English translation of the Chinese classics in our country.In view of that, this thesis selects Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang’s Selections fromRecords of the Historian as the object of study and clearly points out that the translationfeatures of Yang’s translation are the succinctness and fluency and that the maintranslation strategy adopted by Yangs in translating Shi Ji is domestication. Then, theauthor exemplifies them in details from linguistic levels which compromise lexical,semantic, syntactic and stylistic analyses. Meanwhile, the author, choosing receptiontheory as the theoretical tool, tries to interpret the strategies with the concepts of"horizon of expectations","aesthetic distance" and "fusion of horizons". With an eye tothe readers’ horizon of expectations at that time, the author concludes that in translatingShi Ji, Yang, considering the aesthetic distance between the horizons of the text and thereaders, tended to make some adjustments, which accord with the linguistic form of thetarget language, to the source text so as to facilitate common readers’ understanding ofShi Ji, the marvelous Chinese historical masterpiece, thus helping to promote itsspreading all over the world better.