A Study Of The English Translation Of Moral Cultivation Of Kings In Light Of Reception Aesthetics

Mipham Gyatso,a famous Tibetan scholar in modern era,was wise,diligent and eager to learn when he was a child and was very proficient in the teachings of Dharma.His Moral Cultivation of Kings,consisting of twenty-one chapters,was composed on the basis of extensive study of both Tibetan ancient and modern works.It is widely known by the Tibetan people and is characterized with extensive contents,flexible sentence patterns and understandable language.As a great literary work that cannot be ignored in the history of Tibetan literature,Moral Cultivation of Kings has great research values and it has received extensive attention from the translation circles.Reception Aesthetics as a new literary theory emerged in the 1960 s,and the main representatives are the German scholar Hans Robert Jauss(1921-1997)and Wolfgan Iser(1926-2007).It holds that the educational and recreational function of a literary work can only be achieved through the active participation of readers.During the reading process,the readers are active and are the driving force for the literary creation.On the basis of hermeneutics and phenomenology,Reception Aesthetics put forward some concepts such as “horizon of expectations”,“fusion of horizons”,“indeterminacy” and so on,providing a new way for the translation studies.According to the Reception Aesthetics,translation studies are no longer limited on the author-text studies,but begin to pay attention to the implied readers.Therefore,this thesis uses the theory Reception Aesthetics to analyze the Moral Cultivation of Kings which was translated by Professor Li Zhengshuan and Liu Jiao.First of all,this thesis introduces the author and the background of the gnome,as well as the literature review,pointing out the limitations of the existed researches and the necessity of the study from the readers' point of view.And some main concepts of Reception Aesthetics are also introduced in this part which provides a theoretical basis for the discussion of this thesis.Secondly,the author of this thesis analyzes the translation of rhetorical devices and idiomatical phrases,finding that the translator adopts some rhetorical signs which are familiar to the target readers and translates the idioms to the corresponding phrases in the target language to satisfy readers' horizon of expectations;thirdly,the research is mainly conducted from the phonological level,lexical level and the syntactic level to analyze whether the readers' horizon and that of the source text are well fused together.Through the research,it can be concluded that the translator uses different translation methods to bridge the gap between the source text and the target readers,so that the horizon of source text and that of the readers' are well fused;at last,this thesis studies whether the translator leaves indeterminacy for the target readers from the analysis of the translation of culture-loaded words,allusions and images.Through the thorough analysis,the author of this thesis can draw the conclusion that on the basis of ensuing that the readers can understand the source text,the translator retains the exotic cultures in the source text,reproduces the indeterminacy for the target readers and leaves enough space for readers' imagination.