A Report On The Translation Of Mistress Pat From The Perspective Of The Reception Theory

Mistress Pat is a novel written by L. M. Montgomery, a well-known Canadian children’s book writer.. The author of this report translated part of the second chapter of this novel. In this report the reception theory is introduced to analyze the translation, with the focus on the translation of scenery description and dialogues.The type of the source text is defined as young adult literature, a subdivision in children’s literature, with the adolescent as the target reader. Adolescents have their own unique characteristics of age, personality, psychology, and reading habit. Therefore, considering the above characteristics, when doing translation, the translator should always put the reception ability of the target reader in mind. This report adopts the reception theory to analyze the translation done by the author. Reception theory is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes the reader’s reception of a literary text. In the part of case analysis, according to the reception theory, the translation of scenery description and dialogues is analyzed both from two aspects. The translation of scenery description is analyzed at the syntactic and lexical level, and the translation of dialogues is analyzed from the perspective of idiolect and register. It is hoped that by the application of reception theory, the translation will be more acceptable to target readers and meet their aesthetic needs.