Practice Report On The Filling Of Text Blanks In The E-C Translation Of The Sailor’s Wife From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Reception Aesthetics was an important literary theory originated in Germany in the 1960s. Those who establish this theory have freed themselves from traditional literary theories like "original author-centered" theories and "source text-centered" theories and they have raised the status of reader and have established "reader-centered" theories that reader’s initiative and creativity have been strongly emphasized in the process of text reading. "Text blank" is an important concept in Reception Aesthetics. Reception Aesthetics deems that indeterminacy exists in the literary text and it is comprised of text blanks that stimulate reader to interpret the text, to fill in the blanks or concretize the blanks in the process of reading. The meaning of text is never self-formulated; and it is produced in the process of the interaction between the reader and the text. The existence of text blank triggers reader’s act of expectation, prediction and judgment and drives him to interpret the implied meanings of text by using his imagination and reading experience.Though literary text originates from the real world, it sometimes goes beyond the barrier of the reality. Because of the fiction of literary text and its aesthetic necessity, so many text blanks are inevitably left in the text, which are the sources of reader’s imagination. The first role of translator in the process of translation is a reader; hence the translating process is also seen as a process of filling in the text blanks for the translator.The original translation text is extracted from the novel The Sailor’s Wife written by American novelist Helen Benedict. Based on the concept of "text blank" and some theories of Reception Aesthetics, the author translates the extracted text according to the principles of faithfulness and smoothness. With regard to the translation strategies adopted in the translating process, the author adopts the strategy of Foreignization in the translation of culture-loaded words and the strategy of Domestication in language dimensions and might make some changes according to specific cases. This report will explicitly introduce the details of this translation practice and analyze how to fill in the text blanks in The Sailor’s Wife by combining the theories of Reception Aesthetics, some translation strategies and techniques with specific examples extracted from the novel and then make a summary of this translation practice.