On Translation Of Children’s Literature From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics Theory

At the beginning of last century, Chinese children’s literature (short for CL) started to sprout with the trend of introducing foreign literature translation. Over the last one hundred years, thousands of excellent children’s literature works have been translated into Chinese, and all these have become the most significant enlightening reading materials for several generations of our Chinese children. Despite that, the study of the CL translation has not been given the due attention. As books specifically written for child readers, children’s literature is very different from those of adult’s literature in terms of theme, subject, story structural etc. While translating those children’s literature, the translators should not forget that those target readers are our little kids.Because of the particularity of CL readers, the thesis attempts to apply reception theory to the CL translation. According to reception aesthetics, translation is a process of aesthetic recreation. There are two stages of reception in the process of translation. The first stage is the translator’s reception and interpretation of the original text, while the second is the reader’s reception and understanding of the translated text. First, the translator understands the source text with his or her horizon of expectation. The translator should try his or her best to match the horizon in the source text. Then, the translator should pay much attention to the child reader’s horizon and adjust some part of the source text in order to fuse horizons of the translated text and child readers. Owing to limitation of children’s horizons of expectation, the translator should first fill out some indeterminacy of the original text in order to make the text readable for the young readers, and then keep some blanks so as to attract readers’ interest.Within the framework of reception aesthetics, the thesis comparatively analyzes two Chinese versions of Charlotte’s Web translated by Kang Xin and Ren Rongrong respectively. Of them, Kang didn’t aim at any definite reader group, while Ren set children as his target readers. Horizon of expectation, fusion of horizon and indeterminacy are applied to analyze examples from the two translated versions so as to discuss the preservation of child language beauty and culture transfer in translation, which draws inspirations:On one hand, in preserving the child language beauty, in order to achieve the fusion of horizons between the translation and child readers, the translation should be colloquialism of words, simplification of sentences, vividness of expression, and preservation of musical beauty. On the other hand, when dealing with cultural differences, translator should first efface most of gaps and then remain some gaps for children. Through comparative analyzing the two versions, the author points out that Ren’s version takes fully into child readers’ horizons of expectation and is better for children to accept.