Translation Of Children’s Literature From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics—A Case Study Of Peter Pan

Compared with other literature, children’s literature has its own particularity and it plays an important role in the process of children’s growth. Children’s literature possesses the functions of educating, entertaining children and helping with children’s cognition. Translation of children’s literary works is different from translation of other works because of the particularity of children’s literature. Recently, translation study has progressed greatly, and nevertheless there is only a small amount of research on translation of children’s literature. With the development and progress of the society, the quantity of child literary translations increases year after year. All these require us to do more specialized research on translation of children’s literature.The author plans to analyze translation of children’s literature from the perspective of reception aesthetics. Different from traditional translation theories that emphasize the source-text authors and the target texts, reception aesthetics puts an emphasis on the target-text readers. As a new emerging methodology in the field of literary study, reception aesthetics attaches more importance to the reader’s role in literature communication. Reception aesthetics which provides a new foundation and basis for translation of children’s literature takes readers as the center and takes reader’s reception as the aim. Reception aesthetics lays emphasis on readers’active status and effect in the whole process of translation. Readers of children’s literature are children. As a particular reader group, children have particular requirements for the reading texts, for hobbies, interests and cognitive competence of children are quite different from those of common readers, and the particularity of children should be focused more attention on by translators. At the time of translation, translators should take children’s thoughts, cognition and language environment into full consideration, and help children to comprehend and accept foreign children’s literary works preferably. This thesis intends to reveal reception aesthetics’irreplaceable role in translation of children’s literature from the aspect of the particularity of both children readers and children’s literature and the aspect of the application of reception aesthetics to translation of children’s literature. On the basis of the reception aesthetic theory, the author attempts to compare the two Chinese versions of the foreign children’s literary work Peter Pan in accordance with characteristics of children’s literature and its translation. From the perspective of the theory of reception aesthetics, the author analyzes the two versions in detail in terms of linguistic style and child interests’reproduction, obtains the strategies of translating children’s literature from the perspective of reception aesthetics, and therefore reveals the thesis’s theme that translation of children’s literature should be based on the reception aesthetic theory and that translators should not only give expression to the original authors’ basic purpose for writing but also make the target texts much more conform to children readers’ways of thinking under the guidance of the reception aesthetic theory.The thesis consists of six parts.Chapter One is introduction. The author simply introduces need for study and the overall structure of the study.Chapter Two simply analyzes current situation and deficiencies of both relevant studies of children’s literature translation and studies of the application of reception aesthetics to the translation study field.Chapter Three serves as the theoretical framework of this thesis. It summarizes the theory of reception aesthetics, introduces the theoretical basis, main ideas and limitations of reception aesthetics, and points out traditional translation theories’ limitations in the translation of children’s literature by means of comparing traditional translation theories with the reception aesthetic theory.Chapter Four simply introduces the definition and characteristics of children’s literature, the particularity of children’s literature translation and its development in China. And it analyzes translation of children’s literature from the perspective of reception aesthetics, and puts an emphasis on activity and creativity of both translators and readers on the basis of reception aesthetics’reader-centrism. It also puts forward principles of children’s literature translation based on reception aesthetics and matters needing attention during translation.Chapter Five is a case study, in which the author compares the two Chinese versions of Peter Pan from the perspective of reception aesthetics. The author analyzes the two versions in detail from the aspects of linguistic style and child interests’ reproduction on the basis of reception aesthetics. Chapter Six is conclusion, in which the author summarizes the thesis and draws a conclusion that translation of children’s literature should be based on the reception aesthetic theory. And the author puts forward strategies of translating children’s literature from the perspective of reception aesthetics, and reveals the theme of this thesis that translators should make the target texts much more conform to children readers’ ways of thinking under the guidance of the reception aesthetic theory.