Research On The English Translation Of The Butterfly Dream By Yang Xianyi From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

The Butterfly Dream is one of the famous works of Guan Hanqing,the founder of Yuan play,which contains many allusions,names,idioms,and rhetorical sentences.The opera language is personalized and closely connected with people's daily life.Its unique literary style and language style make it challenging to translate Yuan play into English.There are few English translations of The Butterfly Dream in China.Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang are a couple of translators who can be regarded as a combination of the East and West.Their translation of Yuan play starts earlier,and Selected Plays of Guan Hanqing translated by them is one of the successful English translations of Yuan play,from which The Butterfly Dream analyzed in this thesis comes.At present,the domestic research on Guan Hanqing's The Butterfly Dream focuses on its legal,dramatic and literary aspects,but few studies have been made on its English translation.This paper studies Yang Xianyi's English translation of The Butterfly Dream from the perspective of Reception Aesthetics.Reception Aesthetics is a reader-centered literary theory that focuses on the reception of readers,which is of great significance to the study of literary translation.In view of this,based on Reception Aesthetics,this thesis studies Yang Xianyi's English translation of The Butterfly Dream from three aspects: words,sentences and texts through Horizon of Expectation,Indeterminacy and Response-inviting Structure,with a view to providing reference for the English translation of Yuan play and spreading Yuan play to the world.Up to now,no specialized and systematic research on the English translation of The Butterfly Dream has been found in the literature retrieved on CNKI.This is the difficulty and innovation of this thesis,and it also provides possibility and space for further research.