A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Book Of Boy(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

The author chooses chapters nine to fourteen of American writer-Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s children’s literature The Book of Boy as this translation task.Set in the medieval period of Europe,this book boasts beautiful sentences,lucid languages and wonderful plots,enjoying great popularity among children.This translation task aims to introduce new children’s literature to Chinese children,helping them broaden their horizon and know more about cultural knowledge.To improve the quality and readability of the target text,the author adopts reception aesthetics to guide her translation.Reception aesthetics was proposed by German scholars Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser in the 1960 s,which focuses on the role of reader in literature,readers’ horizon of expectation and interaction between readers and the text.The literary text can only be accepted and understood by readers when readers’ horizon of expectation and the target text can be fused,thus making the literary text complete.As the target reader is quite special,reception aesthetics provides a sound theoretical foundation for the translation of children’s literature.Considering children’s limited knowledge and experience of life,the author pays attention to the reading habits,language habits and psychological features during the process of translation.The target text is intended to arouse children’s reading interest and enrich their knowledge during the reading.This report aims to find solutions to the difficulties during the process of translating children’s literature and provide some corresponding translation strategies and methods.Guided by reception aesthetics,the author analyzes some examples from the translation from lexical,syntactical and cultural levels,thus exploring the feasibility of the theory’s application here.At lexical level,the author selects colloquialism,reduplicative words and four-character phrases to increase the affinity,rhythm and literariness of the target text.At syntactical level,division and sentence restructuring have been adopted by the author to make the sentences smooth and natural,conforming to children’s reading habits.At cultural level,given children’s acceptability of the foreign culture,the author mainly adopts domestication to facilitate children’s understanding.As for some foreign culture,the author adopts foreignization,enabling children to broaden their horizon and know more about cultural diversity.By applying reception aesthetics into children’s translation,this report intends to summarize some translation strategies and methods,hoping to provide some suggestions for the future translators of children’s literature.