On The Study Of Translator’s Subjectivity From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

In the long history of the traditional translation studies, translator’s subjectivity has undergone a process of from being neglected to being recognized. The translator, an essential role in the process of translation, has long been put in an invisible place which was always considered inferior to the source text and the author, thus was not given adequate research in the traditional translation studies. The cultural turn in translation since1970s has brought the translator’s subjectivity to the light and the research on this issue has gradually become the hot topic in recent translation studies. With new approaches increasingly applying to the translation studies, the translator has been confirmed as the central status that plays a key role in the whole process of translation. Correspondingly, the study of the translator’s subjectivity has become an extraordinary important subject and is now gaining increasing attention among translation researchers. Based on the theory of Reception Aesthetics, this paper aims to do a research on the translator’s subjectivity in the process of translation by the contrastive study of the two Chinese versions of The Catcher in the Rye.The Reception Aesthetics, established in the late1960s, is an important school in the western literary theories. The two main representatives of the theory are Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, with their respective concept of "horizon of expectation" and "blanks and spots of indeterminacy", providing the possibilities of the differences in interpreting the same literary works. As an influential methodology and paradigm in literary theories, Reception Aesthetics marks a transformation from the source text and the author to the translator and the target readers. Due to its concepts, the receptor’s reaction is taken great priority. In other words, when translating a literary work, the translator should consider the presupposed target readers’aesthetic tendency and receptive ability, the readers’social background and life experience, which constitute the reader’s horizon of expectations. What’more, according to Wolfgang Iser, in the literary works, there are so many blanks and spots of indeterminacy, which build a bridge between the productive consciousness of the source text and the target readers’receptive consciousness. While, the translator, as the reader of the source text and the creator of the target text, must pay more attention to the target reader’s reaction so as to make his or her own understanding better match the target reader’s horizon of expectation, thus achieving the fusion of horizons of the author, the translator and the target readers.The Catcher in the Rye is a great literary work, written by the famous writer J.D. Salinger in1951with its extraordinary writing style and distinctive language features. It has long been considered as a classic work and gained great popularity among the readers home and abroad since its first publication. The background of the story, the way the story narrated, the characters described, and the exposure of the society at that time are all significant to be researched. It is such a vivid and provoking novel that has been translated successively into different languages and has won warm welcome among the readers worldwide. Since now, there are two Chinese versions translated first by Mr. Shi Xianrong and then by Mr. Sun Zhongxu, both of the two versions have showed their great charm and gained wide popularity with different readers in different times. In this paper, the author intends to make a contrastive study of the two Chinese versions (Shi Xianrong’s version and Sun Zhongxu’s version) from the perspective of Reception Aesthetics. The result of the study in this paper shows that Shi Xianrong’s foreignization-oriented strategy and Sun Zhongxu’s domescation-oriented strategy in the translation manifested their active role in concretizing the blanks and spots of indeterminacy due to their own horizons of expectation. In this process, they made full use of their initiative, involving themselves fully into the reconstruction of the source text in the perspective of Reception Aesthetics. From this point, the two Chinese versions were considered as the products of their concretization to the blanks and spots of indeterminacy in the source text, and in this sense, they became the coauthors of The Catcher in the Rye.□This paper also presents that any influential literary works with such great charm like The Catcher in the Rye can stand and deserve endless exploration and interpretation. Just one translated version is not enough to fuse different readers’horizons of expectations in different times, only by reading and interpreting many times can readers get closer to the intention of the writer and the original meaning of the source text, thus successfully exploring and presenting its glorious spirit of the classic literary works.