Translation Of Chinese Traditional Drama From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

The Romance of Western Bower, a classical Chinese traditional drama composed by Wang Shifu in the Yuan Dynasty, is really a great literary work rich in academic and research values. The great drama of the highest artistic accomplishments has far-reaching influences on audiences, readers as well as literary critics for generations as a splendid pearl in Chinese literary history. Meanwhile, the drama, with its unsurpassable literary and artistic achievements, has equally attracted the attention of translators and translation theorists. Professor Xu Yuanchong who well verses himself in translating has made every effort in translating The Romance of Western Bower. His translated version has received great applause both at home and abroad.In the development of literary research in the 20th century, reception aesthetics, as a new and influential methodology in literary theories, marks a shift in concern from the author and the text to the text-reader relationship in literary criticism. As for reception aesthetics, "horizon of expectations", "fusion of expectations" and "indeterminacy" are the main notions. As far as reception aesthetics is concerned, readers' response is the criteria for judging the accomplishment of a literary work. In a literary text, there are many spots of indeterminacy as well as the blanks which help establish a relationship between the creative consciousness of the source text and the reader's receptive consciousness. Thus, in composing a literary text, the author should take into consideration of the reader's social experience, aesthetic tendency and receptive capacity, of which the reader's "horizon of expectations" is consisted. The translator, as the reader of the source text and the writer of the target text, must lay stress on the target reader's reception and reflection to make his own understanding best meet the target reader's "horizon of expectations", so as to achieve the ultimate fusion of horizons among the writer, the translator and the readers.In this thesis, the author views the translation of Chinese traditional drama from the perspective of reception aesthetics. Feasible translation strategy has also been recommended according to different conditions. In general, a strategy of assimilation is recommended to meet the text reader's horizon of expectation, such as their background information, aesthetic capacity and etc., so as to shorten the aesthetic distance and ensure that the readers could understand the meaning of the source text to the greatest extent. But for the culture-loaded items, it is advisable for us to adopt the strategy of alienation to preserve the most of source culture, only if it would not cause misunderstanding for the target readers. Meanwhile, according to the guiding principles of reception aesthetics, the target readers prefer the literary works that share some aesthetic distance from their existing horizon of expectations, that is to say, they aspire to a new and exotic reading experience. In the translated literary text, when necessary, it is advisable to provide additional source cultural information conventional for the source text readers but fresh for target text readers, to satisfy their appetite for novel cultural experience in the appreciation of Chinese traditional drama.