A Study Of The Translation Of Empresses In The Palace—from The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

With the globalization, the world is becoming a closely linked integral whole. As a “soft power”, culture has been a key part of a country's competiveness and the symbol of its comprehensive national strength. Thus, the “going out” strategy for Chinese culture is put forward to introduce more Chinese culture to foreign people. But if Chinese cultural products are only translated into foreign languages, but not accepted by foreign people, these products will fail to finish its function as a bridge and the “going out” is unsuccessful. Therefore, it is significant to study the acceptance of such kind of products. No matter learning from failed or successful experience, both of them will be helpful to the later translation, and the final realization of “going out” of Chinese culture. This paper does a research about Empresses in the Palace under the guidance of the reception aesthetics. Reception aesthetics pays attention to readers and their reading process, thinking that it is reader that finally creates the text meaning. Different from the traditional source text-oriented theory and author-oriented theory, reception aesthetics transfers its focus to the reader and opens a new research angle.This paper first summarizes the previous studies of reception aesthetics, audiovisual translation and the TV series— Empresses in the Palace, and then briefly introduces the main content of reception aesthetics and points out that reception aesthetics is significant to translation study. Empresses in the Palace is an attempt for Chinese TV series to go out to the world. Even though it is not as successful as expected, it deserves attention and study as well. The paper analyzes the reasons why Empresses in the Palace flops in the acceptance with some representative examples from the perspective of reception aesthetics. The author thinks there are two main reasons: first, there are some problems in the subtitle translation; second, over-edition makes the plots abrupt and disordered and affects target audiences' understanding. Ignorance of the target audiences' horizon of expectation and improper disposal of blanks affect the target audiences' understanding and accepting. Therefore, the author thinks that when translating films and TV series, over-edition must be avoided, and the translator should consider the target audiences' horizon of expectation and fill in the blanks properly.