On The Translator’s Subjectivity From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Until the cultural turn of translation studies in the 1970 s, the role of the translators began to be recognized and became a major issue in translation studies. As the subject of translation, the translator plays an important role in the translating process both as a special reader of the original text and the creator of the translated text.The reception aesthetics is a theory of literary criticism, based on hermeneutics and phenomenology, focused on the readers’ reception. The main representatives of this theory are Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. The reception aesthetics was established in western translation studies in the late 1970’s, and came to the fore in the late 1980’s in China. It is mainly used as a brand new perspective to discuss the process of translation, translator’s subjectivity and the target-language reader’s reception. Translation is a communicative activity both in language and culture, which can be divided into two processes: comprehension process and reproduction process. In the course of comprehension, translators firstly act as the readers of the original texts with their own “horizon of expectations”; and then during the latter process, translators play the part of the author of the translated text. They should always have considerations for the target readers and actively exert their subjectivities and creativities to translate the originals into the target languages. Based on the above mentioned theory, taking the American collection of essays Walden of Thoreau as an example, the present author tries to make a comparative study on translator’s subjectivity from the perspective of reception aesthetics. This thesis chooses the Xu Chi’s translated version(Walden) and Li Jihong’s translated version(Walden),aiming to explore the following questions:(1) From the perspective of reception aesthetics, does subjectivity of the translators in different times exist in the process of translation? If yes, how do the translators exert their subjectivity?(2) Both as translators, are there any differences between Xu and Li in the process of translation when they exert their subjectivity? If yes, what are they? Through analyzing and comparing, it elaborates on how the translator plays the double roles of the reader and the creator, and concentrates on the discussion of how the translator conveys the linguistic and cultural message in the process of translation. The study of the translator’s subjectivity from the perspective of reception aesthetics in this thesis provides a new approach to the study of the translator, and tries to provide some references for the future studies.The followings are the major findings of this research: From the perspective of reception aesthetic, translators in different periods of time should take reader’s “horizon of expectations” into consideration and take different methods of concretizing indeterminacies to achieve different effects for readers. The two translators both exert their subjectivity to create the translated text. The two translators’ main focus on the readers’ “horizon of expectations” are the words and idioms, they both used them to show Chinese readers’ likeness and acceptability in different times. Compared with Xu’ version, Li’ version may stimulate reader’s great interest in reading the literary work and help the readers better understand the thoughts of Thoreau; and Xu Chi’s version was created in the early years of new China, the vernacular movement has just influenced Chinese, his work can cater for the need of the readers of his time. However, with the development of Chinese for more than half a century, Li’s version has more modernity, it can better meet reader’s “horizon of expectation” nowadays. First it explains some vague and ambiguous words that have confused readers in Xu’s version. Second, it also adds more western culture knowledge that lack in Xu’s version to meet reader’s thirst for knowledge. Third, it replaces the outdated words with modern words, thus presents the readers a very new angle of view to understand the thoughts of Thoreau as well as the beauty of Walden.