Hermeneutics, Reception Aesthetics And The Translation Of The Lord Of The Rings

The Lord of the Rings, an epic fantasy story, becomes immensely popular in the 1960s. It has remained highly popular till today, ranked as one of the most popular works in the twentieth century. The enduring popularity and the influence of the book have established the author Tolkien the position as the father of modern high fantasy genre. A 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers revealed that The Lord of the Rings had become one of the greatest books of the millennium. Till now, the book has been translated into more than 40 languages, including Brazilian, Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese (traditional version of Taiwan), Danish, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Czech, German, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and so on. However, when the Yilin Press published the Chinese version in 2001, Chinese readers got the chance to know the story. It has been one of the best-selling novels in China since then. Many readers criticize the translation of the work, yet serious study and judgment on the translation are lacking.This thesis will apply the theory of hermeneutics and the reception aesthetics to analyze the translation of The Lord of the Rings. Hermeneutics is a branch of philosophy concerned with human understanding and the interpretation of texts. "Prejudice" is a basic proposition of Hans-George Gadamer, one of the most important contemporary representatives of hermeneutics. An individual with a comprehensive mind always starts his understanding with a certain prejudice. Emphasizing the link between the text and the reader, Gadamer believes understanding is always a historical, dialectic, and linguistic event. Reception aesthetics is developed in Germany during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The central task of Teception aesthetics is to establish a new approach to literary studies. The remarkable difference between hermeneutics and reception aesthetics is that the former is mainly a philosophical theory while the latter is a strict theory for literarycriticism, which shifts the critics' attention away from the producer of the text and also from the text itself toward a dialectic relationship of production and consumption. The history of literature then becomes a crucial element in literary criticism because it allows us to comprehend the historical determinants of our understanding.This thesis attempts to discuss the nature of literary translation and analyze the translation of The Lord of the Rings under the guidance of hermeneutics and reception aesthetics. Structurally, it consists of three chapters. Chapter One offers a general introduction to The Lord of the Rings and the existing translation of the book. Chapter Two includes the studies on the features of text and the intrinsic relationship among hermeneutics, reception aesthetics and translation. To be specifically, under the guidance of hermeneutics and reception aesthetics, the analysis will focus on two receptions of translation process: the first reception is a dialogue between the translator and the author and the second reception is a dialogue between the reader and the translator. The first one is the translator's interpretation of the original works. At the same time, he must consider the reception of the reader. The second one is reader's response and its influence on translation. Then it comes to the nature of translation. Chapter Three is the analysis of the translation of The Lord of the Rings, and will focus on the aspects of the horizon of expectation, the translation, the reproduction of the aesthetic constituents, and reader's response.