A Study On The English Translation Of Su Tong’s Mi:from The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

As an important writer in contemporary China, Su Tong is also indicated as the pioneer of new realistic writing. His major works include Qi Qie Cheng Qun, Hong Fen, Mi, He An, Wo De Di Wang Sheng Huo and Bi Nu (《妻妾成群》、《红粉》、《米》、《河岸》、《我的帝王生活》、《碧奴》).These works have been translated into several languages, including English, French, German, Netherlands, Italian, and Japanese, and they have been well received by the public around the world. Mi was Su Tong’s first full-length novel. When first published in China, Mi immediately aroused the public’s attention, also it showed the subtle change of Su Tong’s writing style from avant-garde to new realism.Howard Goldblatt translated Su Tong’s four works, including Rice (1995), My Life as Emperor (2005), The Myth of Meng:Binu and the Great Wall (2008) and The Boat to Redemption (2010).The English translation of Su Tong’s Mi has also received widespread attention in the West, which exerts positive significance on the diffusion of Chinese literary works. Up to now, domestic academic circles are still at an initial stage in studying the translation versions of Su Tong’s works; therefore, the originality and creativity of this paper stands in selecting Rice, the English version of Su Tong’s Mi as research focus.Reception aesthetics put emphasis on the study of literary reception and response, especially readers’ responses, focusing on the relation between author, work and reader. The theory of reception aesthetics had been applied to translation studies since the late1970s, which tremendously promotes the development of translation studies itself. Thus, this thesis probes into Rice from the perspective of reception aesthetics, namely, from "horizon of expectation","appealing structure" as well as "implied reader" to analyze and summarize Howard Goldblatt’s translation strategies in Rice, so as to enlighten the translators of Chinese literary works in the future. The study of horizon of expectation focuses on macroscopic and microscopic levels. On the macroscopic level, both Howard Goldblatt’s and target readers’ horizons of expectation will be analyzed. Then, the microscopic level finds out how these two kinds of horizon of expectation influence Howard Goldblatt’s translation and summarizes the corresponding translation strategies employed in dealing with directional expectation and innovative translation, respectively. Indeterminacies and blankness, two elements constituting appealing structure in a literary work, simultaneously trigger acts of ideation on the reader’s part to stimulate their reading interests. In this regard, it is also necessary to probe into Howard Goldblatt’s handling of appealing structure in Rice. Last, literary translation from the view of reception aesthetics puts emphasis on complying with implied reader in certain literary works, thus the thesis attention will focus on analyzing Howard Goldblatt’s conformity with implied reader in his translation of characters images and natural images.The major findings and conclusions of this thesis are presented as follows. On the macroscopic level of horizon of expectation, Howard Goldblatt’s personal preference and his excellent competence in Chinese language strongly influenced his selection and high translation quality of Rice, target readers’expectation of literary works with common human values and local features are the reasons why Rice became so popular among target readers. The microscopic level of horizon of expectation finds out Howard Goldblatt’s application of domestication to directional expectation and foreignization to innovative expectation. Being a translator of Chinese literary works, one should gain a considerable knowledge of Chinese literature, besides; target readers’ horizons of expectation should always be taken into consideration in order to accurately present both directional expectation by domestication and innovative expectation by foreignization in translation. In terms of appealing structures in Rice, if target readers have no problem in understanding and accepting appealing structures in original work, then Howard Goldblatt chooses to retain appealing structures by retaining source language expressions or replacing source language expressions with corresponding target language expressions. Otherwise, he omits appealing structures for the sake of target readers’understanding. As a matter of fact, in translating Chinese literary works, translators can follow the same translation strategies to retain original appealing structure in the largest degree. Finally, both characters images and natural images in original work Mi are distinctly presented in Rice, this shows Howard Goldblatt’s conformity with implied reader, further indicates that the theme can be accurately revealed only by complying with the implied reader in original work. Thus, a translator need to adequately grasp the major images and follow implied reader of original work to accurately convey the theme to target readers.