On English Translation Of Text Blanks In Chinese Poetry From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

As a literary criticism, Reception Theory, also called Reception Aesthetics, emerged and developed in the late1960s and the early1970s. In the course of the development of Reception Theory, two schools gradually came into being, which are respectively represented by Hans Robert Jauss as well as Wolfgang Iser. Influenced by the notion of "horizon" raised by Gadamer, Jauss raised a new concept named "horizon of expectations", aiming to explore how the literary text is represented by readers in different times. Enlightened by Ingarden’s "schematic aspects", Iser put forward the concept "appealing structure" in literary text, which is regarded as an opening space filled with blanks and points of indeterminacy.Reception Theory offers a new perspective for translation research. Based on Reception Theory, blanks and indeterminacy are concealed in the literary text, and the textual meaning lies in the interaction between readers and texts rather than the text itself. With the creative employment of literary language, an aesthetic world filled with uncertainty, blanks and connotation is demonstrated in literary work, especially in poetry. Moreover,"appealing structure" in the literary text provides an opening space for readers to accomplish the construction of textual meaning according to their horizon of expectations. Thus, diverse interpretations of the same literary text will be made based on horizon of expectations of different readers.In this thesis, the text blanks in poetry translation will be explored from three aspects in the light of Reception Theory. That is, the text blank at the syntactic level, the text blank at the semantic level as well as the text blank at the level of imagery. Furthermore, a detailed comparative study of Jin Se and its seven English versions will be demonstrated so as to have a comprehensive understanding of text blanks based on Reception Theory. At the same time, this thesis will attempt to give some suggestions on how to deal with the translation of text blanks at each level from the perspective of Reception Theory.This thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter one is the introduction, covering the research background, the research content and the research method, etc. Chapter two is concerned with literature review, which is composed of studies on text blank and Jin Se based on Reception Theory. Chapter three is concerned with the notions of Reception Theory applied in this thesis.In chapter four, three kinds of translation of text blanks are given in a detailed explanation. This chapter mainly discusses the reasons why the text blanks come into being and the factors existing in each kind of text blank from the perspective of Reception Theory. In Chapter five, a detailed comparative study of Jin Se and its seven versions will be analyzed from three aspects based on Reception Theory. In the section of the syntactic blank, the flexible use of words, the omission of sentence components as well as rhyme and rhythm are analyzed in detail. While in the section of semantic blank, a detailed analysis is given in terms of the blank of lexical meaning, symbolic meaning and allusion meaning.In addition, the blank of imagery is analyzed from three aspects, namely, image, emotion and artistic conception. Through a comparative study, we can get some tips or guidelines in terms of translation of text blank from the perspective of Reception Theory. In Chapter six, conclusions are made and some suggestions for further researches stated. Moreover, the limitations of the research in this thesis are listed by the author. That is to say, some other text blanks have not been taken into consideration in this thesis. For instance, the text blank at the thematic level and the structural blank have not been discussed in this thesis. However, these limitations can serve as guidelines for further researches.