| In 2008,Liu Cixin’s science fiction novel Santi was published and it won the73rd Hugo Award in 2015.Santi becomes a milestone in the field of Chinese science fiction.In 2014,Santi was translated into The Three-Body Problem by Ken Liu.The success of The Three-Body Problem indicates that it has been well accepted by the Western readers and it attributes not only to the charm of the source text but also to Ken Liu’s excellent translation.Readers’role is indispensable,but it has been ignored in the appreciation of literary works for a long time.In the 1960s,Reception Aesthetics emerged in Germany as a theory of literary criticism,and its key notions are reader-centered principle,horizon of expectations,aesthetic distance and indeterminacy.Reception Aesthetics emphasizes readers,the process of acceptance of readers and the effect of the works which is a challenge to the traditional literary theories.It is applied into the translation studies in the 1970s.This thesis uses Reception Aesthetics as the guiding theory to examine The Three-Body Problem.Under the guidance of the Reception Aesthetics,this thesis analyzes how the translated version implements the reader-centered principle and how it satisfies the readers’horizon of expectations.Through comparing and contrasting English and Chinese versions of Santi,the author finds that in the process of translation,Ken Liu insists that translator’s primary obligation should be the consideration of the readers and that translator should consider readers’horizon of expectations.At the text structural level,the translator readjusts the text structure to adapt to the reading habits of target readers.At the syntactic level,considering readers’ability to read and accept,the syntactic structure is converted to conform to the language expression habits of target readers.For the contents that are difficult for readers to understand and accept,the translator deletes them in order to avoid the resentment of target readers.In The Three-Body Problem,featured by Chinese characteristics,many political and cultural terms and scientific contents are presented.The Western readers have horizon of expectations for them before reading.In order to satisfy readers’horizon of expectations,Chinese culture,history knowledge and scientific contents and neologisms are introduced by using free translation,literal translation,annotation,amplification,and transcreation in The Three-Body Problem,which increases its familiarity and readability.This thesis consists of five parts.Chapter One is the introduction to the research background,research significance and purpose,research questions,research methodology and the structure of the thesis.Chapter Two is literature review.In this part,the author lists the previous studies on the Reception Aesthetics and The Three-Body Problem at home and abroad.Then the author presents the limitations of previous studies and the necessity of the thesis.Chapter Three is theoretical framework,including a brief introduction to the emergence,theoretical basis,representatives and key notions of Reception Aesthetics.Chapter Four is the core part,an analysis of The Three-Body Problem from the perspective of Reception Aesthetics.Chapter Five is conclusion,major findings,limitations of the thesis and the suggestions for future studies are presented.Through the analysis,it is found that the Reception Aesthetics can be applied to the translation study of science fiction.In the process of translation,the translator should take the target readers’acceptance and horizon of expectations into consideration.Ken Liu takes full account of the target readers when translating Santi,which makes the English version popular among Western readers.This thesis attempts to summarize some successful translation methods,hoping to guide the translation of the Chinese science fiction in the future and promote more Chinese science fiction to the rest of the world. |
