A Contrastive Analysis Of The Paratexts In English Translation Of Lunyu From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

For more than two thousand years,Lunyu,as a classic of Confucianism,has been considered as a moral code for Chinese people in socialization.Since the 19 th century,Lunyu has been spread to the foreign land because of the translation of Lunyu.And altogether,there have been 29 unabridged versions.Taking the paratexts from Chichuang Huang's English version of Lunyu and Simon Leys' version as the research subject,this thesis is going to compare and analyze the receptive influence of the translated works that the added paratexts had imposed on the target readers from the perspective of reception aesthetics put forward by Hans Robert Jauss in the combination with the paratexts theory proposed by Gerard Genette,a French literary critic.Reception aesthetics,also known as reception theory,was a literary criticism proposed by the Constance School led by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser back in 1960 s in Germany.According to reception aesthetics,literary activities are supposed to centre on readers,which thus suggests that the literary activity is a dynamic process consisting of author—works—readers.There are four key notions in reception aesthetics,including expectation horizon,fusion of horizons,indeterminacy,and aesthetic distance.Through the constant fusion of readers' expectation horizon and the horizon of the work,it allows the readers to take in what is new in the literary work progressively and thus a better acceptance of the literary work among readers can be achieved.The enlightenment that the translation studies can gain from reception aesthetics lies in the fact that the essence of translation is a dynamic process which consists of the original text,the target text,the author,the translator,and the target reader.This puts forward a requirement for the translators that they should take the target readers' involvement in the translation process seriously and fully take the expectation horizon and aesthetic needs of the target readers into consideration during the translation practice in the hope of achieving the equivalent aesthetic and receptive result of the original text by exerting various translation strategies and methods.As for the notion of paratexts,it refers to the verbal or other materials(prefaces,post faces,titles,dedications,illustrations)and a number of other in-between phenomena that mediate between the text and the reader and serve to “present” the work.The paratext serves as a supplement to the main text and provides a context and guidance for the target readers.Based on this sense of centering on target readers,the English versions of Lunyu with the added paratext are able to broaden the target readers' expectation horizon and thus better the receptive result of the versions among target readers.Taking the paratexts in two English versions of Lunyu by Chichuang Huang and Simon Leys receptively as the study subjects,this thesis is going to compare the receptive result among target readers that the added paratexts have exerted on the basis of expectation horizon,fusion of horizon,indeterminacy and aesthetic distance and conclude how the receptive result under different types of the paratexts affect the translation strategies that the translators adopted.The comparison will be done through four different types of paratexts including prefaces and post faces,pronunciation instruction,illustrations and notes and the methods of case study and comparative study will be adopted in this research.Through a case study,a summary of how different types of the paratexts influence the translators' translation strategies.It has been found out that the contents of the preface part play a crucial role in broadening and reconstructing the target readers' expectation horizon,which puts forth a requirement for translators that they should provide as much information in the preface part as possible;different types of the notes have different effects on the target readers' acceptance of a translated work: interlinear notes benefit the target readers in their immediate comprehension of the main text while end notes allow the target readers to read the main text more fluently without any interruption.Both of the two ways have their own advantages and disadvantages.Therefore,translators are supposed to adopt the types based on the specific situations;the illustration part has its own proportion in reconstructing the target readers' expectation horizon.In conclusion,translators are supposed to set the target readers for the text prior to the translation practice.In the midst of the translation process,it is advised that the translators take target readers into account and broaden target readers' expectation horizon by adopting the strategy of adding the paratexts,which can be of help in bettering the fusion of horizons of target readers and the translated work and in forwarding the communication between the Chinese traditional culture and the western culture.