A Comparative Study On The Four Chinese Versions Of Animal Farm From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

With the continuous enhancement of China’s comprehensive national strength and the increasing frequency of international exchanges in political,economic and cultural fields,the role of translation has become more prominent.Literary translation plays a very important role in cultural exchanges among countries,so it is a very urgent task to improve the quality of translation in this new era.The reception theory originated in the 1960 s,and its representatives are Jauss and Iser of Constantz School.Traditional translation studies focus on the equivalence between the source text and the target text.Reception theory focus on that literary works can realize their literary value and social function only if they are understood and accepted completely by readers.Reception theory emphasizes the reader’s position and function,thus it can be seen that reception theory has many agreeing points with literary translation.Reception theory becomes a new research perspective to literary translation.Animal Farm is one of George Orwell’s most important works.It has many translated versions and a good reputation,so it has high research value.From the perspective of reception theory,this paper aims to make a comparative analysis of the four Chinese versions of Animal Farm on the level of vocabulary,sentence structure and rhetoric to explore the attention of different translators to readers’ horizon of expectations,hoping to give some inspiration and enlightenment to translators engaged in literary translation.This thesis makes a comparative analysis of the four Chinese versions of Animal Farm from the linguistic and rhetorical two dimensions by means of close reading,comparative analysis,literature research and descriptive study,and summarizes the enlightenment of reception theory on literary translation.Through comparative analysis,the following conclusions are drawn: Firstly,the translator is not only the reader of the original text,but also the author of the target text.The translator needs to have a thorough and correct understanding of the source text,which includes the meaning and the theme of the original text.Secondly,in the process of literary translation,the translator should not only faithfully convey the meaning of the original work,but also conform to the linguistic characteristics of the target language and meet the horizon of expectations of the target readers.Thirdly,the translator should properly deal with the indeterminacy text,and the translated text should not be confusing to the target readers.Through the application of reception theory to the study of literary classics,this thesis aims to provide some new ideas and references for English-Chinese literary translation theory and practice and provide some case studies for translation teaching.