A Study On The Translation Of Chinese Culture-Specific Items In Playing For Thrills——from The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Wang Shuo is a domestic heavyweight writer, who has huge influence on contemporary China. Beginning writing in 1978, he has published many novels as well as novelettes, such as Playing for Thrills and Please Don’t Call Me Human. In 2007, Wang Shuo crowned No.6 on “the Second Rich List for Chinese Writers in 2007”, which triggered widespread concern at home and abroad. To our disappointment, there is no research paper on Goldblatt’s translation of Wang Shuo’s works, not a single paper on the translation of Playing for Thrills. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out a concrete study on the translation of Playing for Thrills.This paper argues that the translator not only pays proper respect to the source text and culture, but also focuses on the high readability and the reader’s reception situation. Considering the cultural similarity and difference between the source language and the target language, the translator should adopt proper strategies to cater to the reader’s creative expectation. The latter part of the paper shows detailed analysis of examples in light of Reception Aesthetics. Reception Aesthetics has three main aspects: reader’s horizon of expectation, the implied reader and text’s indeterminacy. In Goldblatt’s translation of Playing for Thrills, he manages to avoid confusion aroused by linguistic and cultural difference and lays great importance to readability in order to make the target readers accept the text more easily. In light of Reception Aesthetics, this paper tries to analyze the translation methods of the culture-specific items in Goldblatt’s translation of Playing for Thrills and conclude some translation methods and suggestions about culture-specific items, it is hoped that the findings of this paper could make contributions to the translation of Chinese contemporary literature.