On Children’s Literature Translation Study From The Perspective Of Inter-subjectivity

Children’s literature plays an important role in children’s growth for its cognitive, aesthetic, educational and recreational function. Translating foreign children’s literature is an important way for the development of Chinese children’s literature. Due to the neglect of the researches on translation theories for long, children’s literature translation is lack of systematic guidance. Therefore, the researches on theories fall behind the practice, which leads to the imbalanced development of children’s literature translation.In combination with the particularity of children’s literature and its historical development, children’s literature translation studies both at home and abroad are divided into two categories:adult-orientation and child-orientation, although the criterions of translation are different. Various kinds of translation theories such as Skopos Theory, Reception Theory, Functionalism and Manipulation are applied to the study of children’s literature translation. However, the relationship among the adult author, adult translator and the children readers is rarely involved. And this kind of relationship is just what children’s literature translation concerns most. How to deal with the relationship between adults and children is a significant problem which the translator of children’s literature faces. Inter-subjectivity focuses on the interaction between a subject and the others and discusses the subjectivity of persons. Inter-subjectivity holds that translation activity involves multiple subjects. The original author, the translator and thearget reader are subjects in the whole translation process, which happens to hold the same view of the problem in the study of children’s literature translation. Therefore, this thesis will adopt inter-subjectivity to discuss the topic in order to give another view of children’s literature translation study and try to look for the ways of dealing with the relationship between adults and children by discussing the subjective relationship among each subject in children’s literature translation.According to inter-subjectivity, the relationship among each subject in translation activity should be seen as a harmonious, equal communication. Therefore, both adults and children are subjects in children’s literature translation. The adult author is creative subject, adult translator is translating subject and child reader is receptive subject. The three subjects experience the whole translation process from creation to translation, and then to reception. By this, inter-subjectivity provides possibility of solving the contradictions among adult subject and child subject.The thesis will take Yang Jingyuan’s version of Peter Pan to give a detail analysis about the application of inter-subjectivity to children’s literature translation. By analyzing subjects, inter-relationships among them and some concrete example in the version, the thesis further indicates that translation process is the process of negotiating and compromising between each subject to reach a common view at last. The translator should skillfully deal with the interrelationship among the other two subjects. Specially, the translator should understand and imitate the original author, present child interest, bridge cultural gaps and moderately surpass understandability.The study shows at last:there is some suggestive guidance for children’s literature translation from the perspective of inter-subjectivity. In the process of translating children’s literature, the original author, the translator and the target reader should acknowledge and respect each other, and participate into the dialogue actively. The translator can translate well only by coping with the relationship with the author and the reader and choosing suitable translation principles and methods.