On The Translation Of Children’s Literature From The Reception Aesthetics

As one of the most classical children’s literature work, Andersen’s Fairy Tales has been introduced into China for almost one century. Many Chinese scholars have translated this book and some studied its features in literature. But the deep study on its translation is limited. This shows the great imbalance between the theory and practice in children’s literature.This thesis applies reception aesthetics into comparative study on two Chinese translations of Andersen’s Fairy Tales--Ye Junjian’s and Ren Rongrong’s versions in three levels:sound, grammar and rhetoric. This thesis firstly analyzes the definitions, classifications and characteristics of children’s literature as well as the present situation of children’s literature translation in China and abroad. Then it reviews three key concepts of reception aesthetics:status and role of readers, horizon of expectation and indeterminacy and vacancy of the text meaning and analyzes their feasibility on children’s literature translation. After introducing the background of two Chinese versions of Andersen’s Fairy Tales, this thesis chooses22examples to illustrate that according to reception aesthetics, translators should respect children readers’ role following the child-centered principle and select the most proper strategy according to the psychological characteristics and acceptability of children readers. Only when the translator pays due attention to the communication between the source text and translators and that between reader and translated text, uses simple and understandable language and keeps the artistic conception and children tastes of the original text, their translation can gain the acceptance and appreciation from children. On the basis of comparative study, this thesis suggests that owing to the characteristics of children’s literature, its translation should adopt free translation as the dominant method, literal translation as the subsidiary and transliteration as the supplementary one.This thesis is the first to apply reception aesthetics to make a comparative study on Chinese translation of Andersen’s Fairy Tales. It is proved that reception aesthetics plays positive role in guiding children’s literature translation. However, in spit of gaining a few successful studies, the application of reception aesthetics in children’s literature translation is still in an experimental stage and highly needs the systematic further researches. The author hopes that this thesis can call more attention to this field so that the theoretical studies on children’s literature translation can be promoted and under their guidance can more excellent works be created.