Retranslation Of Literary Works From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

As a long-standing phenomenon, retranslation has been discussed by translation researchers from different aspects. Since the retranslation trend appeared in the 1990s has provided more new source materials for the researchers, people may approach this problem from different angles and thereby have a deeper understanding of this phenomenon.This paper tries to analyze the phenomenon of retranslation from the perspective of Aesthetics of Reception. On the one hand, the original literary work is full of "emptiness", the meaning of which is uncertain; on the other hand, different readers, due to their different horizon of expectation, have their different understanding. In this way, retranslation is reasonable as well as inevitable. Therefore, one original text could have more than one translation. Translators of different times, being influenced by different cultural backgrounds, may have different understanding of the original works. Meanwhile, readers of different times differ in their reception ability and reception psychology. All these factors show that translators should adopt different strategies when they are doing retranslation, and try to meet different readers' demand. And then, with the retranslation of Vanity Fair as the example, after comparing Yangbi's translation with two retranslation versions which were published 40 years later, this paper has come to the conclusion that owing to the development of cultural communication, the change of readers' expectation horizon as well as the difference of translator's expectation horizon, retranslation should show new understanding of the original text, should respect former translation and inherit the essence of it, should respect current readers' reception ability and reception psychology, and try to make more innovations in understanding and expression.