A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Wuthering Heights From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

Emily Bronte’s only novel–Wuthering Heights is widely considered to be one ofthe greatest works of fiction ever written. It has many versions with long acceptancehistory in China.Reception Theory is a literary critic theory originated in the late1960s in Germanywhich influenced greatly by Hermeneutics and Phenomenology. It has greatenlightenment in literal translation and really opened up a new world for literaltranslation and literary criticism. The literary works are full of indeterminacy andvacancy of meaning which enables the translator and the reader to fill in and adjust theirhorizon of expectation.This thesis makes a comparative analysis about the English novel WutheringHeights. It tries to analyze the formation reasons and the differences of the two versionsin aspects of religious beliefs and cultural backgrounds. It points out that through theconcretization of the translator and the adjustment of the horizon of expectation, thetranslator can fill in the indeterminacy and vacancy of meaning. The filling materials arecomes from the translator’s horizon of expectation. This thesis analyzes Yang Yi’sversion and Fang Ping’s version as an example. Yang Yi’s version and Fang Ping’sversion was the representative version and caught great attention by many people. Thesetwo versions contribute a lot to the China’s transmission and acceptance and are theimportant part of the translation history of Wuthering Heights. These two translators havedifferent horizon of expectation and different translation pursuit as well as the differentunderstanding of the religious and culture. Literary text is full of gaps andindeterminacies and derived from multi-level systems of language structure. They appealreaders to communicate with the text by concretizing the gaps, adjusting their horizons,and reconstructing the meaning. This thesis introduces the basic concepts of Reception Theory: Horizon of Expectation, Indeterminacy, Vacancy of Meaning and AppealingStructure. The author uses these concepts to analyze the formation reasons of differentversions and how the different versions can be formed. The author made a detailedanalysis based on the original text and the two versions.