A Contrastive Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Charlotte’s Web From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Owing to the long-term marginal position of children’s literature in literature system,the translation of children’s literature deserves not enough attentions.The translation study of children’s literature in China is also falling far behind practice.As one of the influential works written by E.B.White,the famous writer of children’s literature in America,Charlotte ’s Web(1952)ranks the first in top ten popular books for children.This work mainly tells a warm story of a spring pig named Wilbur and its friendship with Charlotte,a big grey spider,and Charlotte protects Wilbur from being killed by sacrificing its own life selflessly.Comparing with those well-known children’s literature works like The Wonderful Wizard of OZ(Layman Frank Baum,1900)or The Happy Prince and Other Tales(Oscar Wilde,1888),the scholars in China seldom use Charlotte’s Web as an object to make translation studies,which inspires the author that choosing Charlotte’s Web to study children’s literature translation is of great significance.The Chinese versions used in this contrastive analysis are Kang Xin’s(1979)and Ren Rongrong’s(2004).Coming into being in late 1960s and early 1970s,reception aesthetics is a greatly influential literary theory and criticism school.It makes up the defects of the previous two-dimensional literary study,and emphasizes the status and function of reader ’s reception awareness and recreation in actualizing the literary value.Reception aesthetics has two philosophical roots:the first is phenomenological philosophy and aesthetics represented by Edmund Husserl and Roman Ingarden;the second is genetic epistemology brought up by Jean William Fritz Piaget.Its representatives are Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser who both taught at the University of Constance in Germany.Directly influenced by Hans-Georg Gadamer,Jauss comes up with the concept of ’horizon of expectation’ on the basis of ’rational prejudice’,while Iser brings up the idea of ’indeterminacy of text’ under the influence of Ingarden’s phenomenological aesthetics.In this thesis,the author will make a contrastive analysis between Kang Xin’s version(1979)and Ren Rongrong’s version(2004)from the perspectives of "horizon of expectation" and "indeterminacy of text".This thesis aims to explore how two translators adapt the horizons of their versions to that of children’s horizon of expectation in different times and how two translators concretize the indeterminacies of text,and summarize the methods adopted by two translators.The major findings of this thesis are:(1)Since this original novel Charlotte’s Web is children-oriented,so the target readers,including potential children reader,should also be put at the first place.In other words,the translators should consider the Chinese children’s horizon of expectation in different cultural environments of different times.(2)As for the indeterminacies of text,two translators,Kang Xin and Ren Rongrong,use various methods to concretize them,resulting in different accepting levels of the Chinese versions.Specifically,Kang uses literal translation,free translation and paraphrasing,while Ren uses amplification,paraphrasing,literal translation and substitution.(3)Kang inclines to use Chinese four-character phrases and very elegant words,which might be accepted by readers who have a relatively higher education background.Ren’s version is more acceptable to children for its simple and clear language style.(4)Both of two translators adopt literal translation and free translation as main methods.The former ensures the faithfulness to the original text,while the latter guarantees the smoothness of Chinese version to a large extent,providing Chinese children readers with understandable versions.