Translation Of Children’s Literature From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

Children’s literature plays a pivotal role in children’s growth and development. Although there are plenty of various translated literary works for children on Chinese market, it is a pity that there are few researches about children’s literature translation, and the attention on it is far less than that on adults’literature. Thus, this thesis makes a comparative analysis of two Chinese versions of the world famous children’s literature Anne of the Green Gables under the guidance of Reception Theory.Reception Theory provides a new theoretical angle for translation research, which conveys translation research from text-centered to reader-centered, and holds the opinion that translators should take readers’accepting ability and horizon of expectation into consideration, and make translation fuse with readers’horizon of expectation to the greatest extent. The target readers of children’s literature are children, who have great differences in age, psychology, social experiences, knowledge level and reading ability compared with adult readers. Therefore, when translating for children, translators should take these characteristics into consideration, and make the translation acceptable for children.This thesis chooses two representative Chinese versions of Anne of Green Gables, and makes a comparative analysis of them from the aspects of sound, lexis, rhetoric and linguistic form under the guidance of Reception Theory, then comes to a conclusion that only when the translation conforms to children’s language features and fuses with their horizon of expectation can it be better accepted by children. Then the thesis proposes some suggested principles for children’s literature translation, namely, conforming to children’s horizon of expectation and representing children’s language which includes concrete and understandable words, colloquial and lifelike expressions, simple sentence structure, vivid and interesting rhetoric devices and maintaining rhythm and rhymes. And then the thesis gives a suggested translation strategy for children’s literature translation, which is adopting domestication as the primary strategy and foreignization as the supplementary strategy.This thesis does not aim at judging which version of Anne of Green Gables is superior to the other, but to illustrate what kind of language can better conform to children’s horizon of expectation, so as to provide a new train of thought to the future translation study, and serve as a reference to the children’s literature translators to translate more successful literary works for children.