A Comparative Study On Chinese Versions Of The Kite Runner From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

The Kite Runner published in 2003 was the debut of Khaled Hosseini as well as the first literary work of American Afghanistan. Since the year when the simplified Chinese version of The Kite Runner was published, more and more researches have been conducted on its translation in recent years, most of which, however, just focus on the faithfulness of the translated versions to the original work and subjectivity of the translators in the translation process. Thus, there are still much work to be conducted on the target readers’ reception of these two versions. In view of this, the thesis takes the two Chinese versions of The Kite Runner as the study objects, aiming at demonstrating the forming process of the two versions objectively and making a comparison on the reception of them comprehensively from the perspective of reception theory. The concepts such as “fusion of horizons”, “horizon of expectation”, “indeterminacy” and “aesthetic distance” of the reception theory will be applied as a theoretical guidance in the whole research.Firstly the thesis analyzes how the target readers’ horizon of expectations have been met in terms of ideology tendency, cultural background, religious beliefs and historical background; then it explores how the two translators achieve the fusion of horizons between target readers and the original text in light of dealing with allusions, using different form and reproducing different narrative methods; as for the indeterminacies in the text, it analyzes under what circumstances they have been maintained or concretized; finally the thesis discusses how the two translators adjust the aesthetics distance on syntactical level and lexical level. This research demonstrates that the reason of the better acception of Li Jihong’s version lies in his full consideration on the target readers’ language acceptability, cognitive ability, cultural orientation, aesthetic standards as well as ideology tendency.Study has shown that the translator must take a full consideration on the readers’ acceptability and have readers participate in the process of translation. This thesis provides a new angle and a new method for the study of the Chinese version of The kite runner, and proves the unique and comprehensive significance of reception theory in literary translation.