On The Translation Strategies Of American Nature Writing From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

In recent years,the environment has been polluted more and more severely and the ecological imbalance has attracted the attention of all countries.Humans start to rethink the industrial civilization and desire to return to the green world.The western nature writing satisfies readers' imagination,and thus people starts to pay more attention than before to such works.With an increasing number of American nature writing works being translated into Chinese,it is worth for translators to consider which strategies should be adopted in translating nature writing in order to enable the readers to accept such works and think about the relation of nature and human,culture and society so that communication can be built between readers and the nature to foster their ecological awareness and ecological responsibility.However,there is no relevant study on how to translate this literary genre-nature writing successfully in China until now.Reception theory,also called ReceptionAesthetics,was developed by some scholars at the University of Constance in Germany in late 1960 s and early 1970 s.Reception theory does not focus attention upon writer or text but the readers and raises reader to an important position.Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser were considered to be the most important representatives among the scholars.Jauss puts forward the important concept of Expectation of Horizon,which refers to the pre-understanding and experience affecting understanding and reception in the process of reading,while Iser believes the appealing structure consisting of indeterminacy and vacancy plays a significant role in leading readers to read.Walden,written by an American writer Henry David Thoreau,is the classic piece of American nature writing and has been recognized as the “Green Bible” by environmentalist.Therefore,the author chooses it to conduct a case study and employs the two concepts of Reception theory-Horizonof Expectation and appealing structure,to study the Chinese versions on the linguistic level,cultural level and the ecological transmission.With representative examples such as pun,the author has made comparative analysis on the translations of Xu Chi and Pan Qingling to explore how to choose translation strategies so that readers of American nature writing can identify with the author strongly.