A Corpus-Based Study On Dialogue Translation In Shi Kai's Translated Version Of Pollyanna From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

This study investigates translated dialogues in children's literature based on Reception Theory advocated by Jauss and Iser.The kernel of this theory lies in readers.The theory directs people's attention from originals to readers and from author-centred idea to reader-centred one which means to translate for readers.Based on corpus-based approach,this research examines dialogues in Shi Kai's translation of children's literature Pollyanna with quantitative and qualitative analyses.The dialogues from both the English original and the Mandarin translation are extracted via the Perl language,and a Chinese-English bilingual parallel corpus is compiled by aligning extracted dialogues from the translation with their corresponding ones from the original by the computer software Trados.A descriptive study is conducted to find out if the translated dialogues conform to the reader-centred idea from three aspects:linguistic,rhetorical and cultural.The results show that Reception Theory plays a vital role in guiding translating children's literature.To some extent,a descriptive study makes the translations of fictional dialogues comprehensible.The numbers of the translated dialogues which conform to linguistic,rhetorical and cultural aspects are 1498,209 and 721 respectively with percentages of 61.7%,8.6%and 29.7%accordingly.Thus,the translated dialogues meet the reader-centred kernel idea of the theory.The results prove that translated works can be accepted by readers only if they conform to the three concepts of the theory which are Horison of Expecations,Role and Status of the Readers,and Fusion of Horisons.Besides,as a special group in the society,children have their characteristics in terms of age and receiving abilities,so translators may use concise words and sentences,vivid and interesting rhetorical devices,and comprehensible cultural-loaded expressions when they translate children's literature.This paper has both theoretical and realistic significances.For one thing,the study is a further exploration of dialogue traslations in children's literature from the perspective of Reception Theory;for another,it help readers from mainland China to comprehend and appreciate translations of English children's literature.