On The Translation Of Puns From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

As a common rhetorical device, puns are widely used to make the language vivid, witty, humorous, and to evoke the reader’s rich imagination. Therefore, it is quite important to translate puns in literary works properly.Since it was first published in1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by the English writer Lewis Carroll has won high popularity among readers all around the world. With its unique and humorous story, the book has been translated into more than80different languages. Because of the large numbers of puns in it, this work used to be regarded as an "untranslatable miracle".In the1960s, Reception Aesthetics or Reception Theory started to be used in literary research, which symbolized a shift in concern from the text and the author to the text-reader relationship in literary criticism. The two main representatives of Reception Aesthetics, Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, hold that the reader plays an active role in the process of text reception and that the reader’s reaction should be the criterion for judging the quality of a literary work. Therefore, the author, as well as the translator, should take the reader’s "horizon of expectation" into consideration, so that the value of a literary work can be realized. This thesis, mainly focusing on YuenRen Chao’s Chinese version of the puns in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with some typical examples taken from Leng Shan’s Chinese version in the light of Reception Aesthetics, intends to sum up the translation strategies of puns. It concludes that Reception Aesthetics is of practical guidance to the translating of puns in literary works like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. On one hand, the translators should properly fill in the "indeterminacies" of the puns with the reader’s "horizon of expectation" in mind, helping the target readers understand and appreciate the original work. And on the other hand, the translators should also sometimes keep the "indeterminacies" of the puns in literature works after meeting the reading demands of the target readers. Only in this way can the readers make full use of their imagination to dig out the implied meaning in the literary works, successfully achieving their "principal status" in the process of reading.