Readers' Influence On Literary Translation

Reception aesthetics, rising in Germany in the late 1960s, shows acute awareness of readers'active role in the interpretation of meaning. It has provided literary translation studies a new theoretical perspective and research methodology and made readers'active role in literary translation visible.Literary translation is a dialogical process taking place in a certain social context. The whole process can be divided into two phases: firstly, the translator, as a special reader, understands and interprets the source text; secondly, he recreates the target text. The translator tries to comprehend the meaning and information of the text under the guidance of his horizon of expectations, so the translation inevitably involves his reading. Meanwhile, the translator, to make his translation acceptable, must bear his potential readers in mind and has constant communication and dialogues with them when producing the target text. According to reception aesthetics, readers'horizons of expectations differ synchronically and diachronically. Therefore, the study of readers'influence on literary translation should be multiple and dynamic.This thesis conducts a comparative study on three translations of Jennie Gerhardt and analyses readers'influence on literary translation from four aspects: readers'cultural outlooks, linguistic aesthetic expectations, reception abilities of culture-loaded terms, and reading habits. The comparative study aims at showing the variation and improvement of readers'(i.e., translators'and their potential readers') horizons of expectations as time passes and their influence on literary translations at different times.It is necessary to points out that reception aesthetics is a dialogical theory. The text is a unity of indeterminacy and determination. The determination of the text set restrictions over translators'interpretations, making translators (as readers of the source text) control their interpretations to the source text to certain range. Translators should concretize the indeterminacies in proper ways and within the limitation of the inviting structure of the source text. Meanwhile, their consideration for potential readers does not mean catering to readers'vague taste but to broaden their horizons of expectations.