A Study On Howard Goldblatt's Translation Of Tales Of Hulan River From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

With the fresh style and profound thoughts in her works,Xiao Hong becomes the leader of modern Chinese women writers in the 1930 s,and her autobiographical novel Hulanhe Zhuan is the peak of her writing.The novel delicately depicts the customs and spiritual life in the northeastern region of China.The famous writer Mao Dun once praised this novel as “a narrative poem,a colorful genre painting,and a haunting ballad” in the preface to the 1974 Chinese edition.The only English version of this novel is translated by the celebrated American translator Howard Goldblatt.For a long time,he has been awarded repeatedly for translating modern Chinese literature and gained international reputation,but his love for Chinese literature and translation stems from Xiao Hong.To some degree,Goldblatt's English translation of Tales of Hulan River reflects his translation features in early times.Reception Aesthetics is a literary aesthetic theory put forward by the German Constance School in the 1960 s,and the representatives are Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser.The fundamental feature of this theory lies in shifting the focus of literary criticism from the text and the author to the reader and the relationship between readers and works.In the following ten years,Reception Aesthetics was widely applied into the field of translation,which greatly promoted the development of translation studies.Based on the theory of Reception Aesthetics,this thesis makes a systematic study on Xiao Hong's Hulanhe Zhuan and Howard Goldblatt's English version,Tales of Hulan River.It interprets the text mainly from the three key concepts of Reception Aesthetics,that is,horizon of expectation,indeterminacy and implied reader,and tries to explore the reader factors that affect the translation and how the Reception Aesthetics helps to analyze Goldblatt's translation.In the process of analysis,this thesis summarizes Goldblatt's corresponding translation techniques: addition,omission and shifts.The results show that translator's horizon of expectations,such as bilingual ability,personal preference and translation thoughts play a critical role in the selection of source text and the quality of translation.At the same time,target reader's pursuit of exotic culture makes Tales of Hulan River widely accepted.From the microcosmic point of view,Goldblatt tends to adopt domestication to deal with directional expectation,and foreignization is applied to deal with innovative expectation.What's more,the translator takes the target reader's receptivity into account and combines the directional expectations and innovative expectations together to achieve the fusion of expectations between target readers and the translation work.In order to keep the reader's interest in reading,some of the indeterminacies are preserved;considering the limited ability to accept the Chinese cultural elements,some indeterminacies are concretized.In addition,both character images and natural images in Xiao Hong's Hulanhe Zhuan are preserved and highlighted in the English version to show Goldblatt's conformity with implied reader,which indicates that the themes of source text can be effectively grasped and conveyed only by complying with the implied reader of the original text.The translation makes full use of all kinds of translation techniques to meet the readers' horizon of expectations as well as aesthetic experience and promotes the dissemination of Chinese culture.The present writer hopes that this study will provide some reference for the future studies on the English version of Tales of Hulan River.