A Report On The Translation Of The Covenant: Ten Stories Of King Arthur

This report is based on the author’s practice of translating The Covenant: Ten Storiesof King Arthur. Containing ten stories of King Arthur, this novel is a collection of storieswritten by Michael Scott, who tries to rewrite the old stories under new ideologies, socialconditions, and environments. Under the guide of Reception Aesthetics, the translatorintends to express the meaning of the source text in the translation through the readers’reception and the interaction with the intention of the writer.There are four parts in the report. Firstly, the report gives a brief introduction to thesource text, translation task, and the target reader of the translation. Secondly, the translatorexpounds the basic concepts and representatives of the Reception Aesthetics and explainsthe reasons for applying it in the translation practice. Thirdly, through case analysis, thisreport illustrates how Reception Aesthetics is applied to handle the difficulties thetranslator encountered in the translation process, that is, the translation of conversation,and the translation of description. Colloquial language and formal language are used tohandle conversation translation. For the translation of description, analysis is undertakenfrom two aspects, namely, in lexical level and in syntactical level. It is found that thetranslator should bear in mind that the selection of words and sentence patterns shouldaccord with the target readers’ needs and make the translation vivid and acceptable. At last,the translator makes a conclusion of the whole report and hopes that it will give somesuggestions to those translators who may undertake translation tasks of similar source textin the future.