A Study On The Translation Methods Of The Wandering Earth From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

The popularity of the Spring Festival movie The Wandering Earth in 2019 has triggered renewed attention on its original novel.Once published in 2000 by the new generation of science fiction novelist Liu Cixin,it won the grand prize of Galaxy Awards for this year.Nowadays,Chinese science fiction has been booming with great potential.A large number of works from excellent local science fiction writers have been translated into foreign languages and sent overseas.This has become an integral part of "Going Global" strategy for Chinese culture.There is not much research on this work itself,although the work has been highly recognized by the science fiction circles at the beginning of its publication.Only after the film showed and hit,did the related research gradually increase.Not to mention,there is less research on its translation.In the 1960 s,Reception Theory emerged.The paradigm of translation studies began to gradually shift,with the object of studies transferring from the text or author at the beginning to the reader.Reception Theory centers on the dynamic relationships among the author,text,and reader,and it stresses the creative influence that readers bring to refine the meaning of a work and its aesthetic value.The English version of The Wandering Earth is recognized by most western readers.The success of the translation results from readers’ acceptance and how translators consider readers in translation.Therefore,based on the Reception Theory,this thesis applies several important concepts,such as horizon of expectations,aesthetic distance,fusion of horizons,and blank of text,to analyze the translation methods adopted by translators in the English version of The Wandering Earth from three aspects: characters,scientific scenes and culture-specific words,so as to make up for the deficiency of the research on its English translation and provide reference for the future research on Chinese science fiction.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter one details the background,significance,objects and questions of the study,as well as the structure and content of this thesis.Chapter two reviews the previous studies on the English translation of Chinese science fiction,The Wandering Earth,and application of Reception Theory on translation.In chapter three,some important concepts in Reception Theory are clarified,such as horizon of expectations,aesthetic distance,fusion of horizons,and blank of text.Chapter four analyzes the translation methods adopted by translators in novel translation by means of Reception Theory.The final chapter summarizes the research findings,limitations and suggestions for future studies.In this thesis,the author intends to answer the question: what translation methods do the translators use in English version of The Wandering Earth to reflect the application of Reception Theory?Through analyses,the author draws the following conclusions.In the translation of names,translators tend to use free translation,which is convenient for western readers to read and remember;And when translating something about personality characteristics,translators slightly add to the “blanks” in the original work,but by and large,the rhetorical devices of omission and hyperbole in the original work are retained as much as possible in order to increase the appeal structure of the text,let readers read and recreate more actively in the process of filling “gaps”,break their directed and habitual horizons,and attract them to dig out the text at a deeper level.In the translation of scientific scenes,translators tend to use division to reduce the reading burden of target readers when faced with long sentences.While in the face of vocabularies,translators do not stick to literal translation or free translation,but flexibly deal with linguistic and cultural differences and conflicts according to the context.In the translation of culture-specific words,translators adopt domestication and foreignization flexibly according to readers’ horizon of expectations.And in this novel,the translators use more domestication than foreignization.