A Report On The Translation Of Children’s Story The Truth Of Me Under The Guidance Of Reception Aesthetic Theory

The translation project selected The Truth of Me,a children’s short story published in 2013 by Patricia McLachlan,a famous American children’s literature writer,as the source text.There are about 12,000 words of this story which has no Chinese version yet.The author demonstrates warm relationships between family members and scenes in family life through the frequent application of short sentences and dialogues.After reading,targeted readers can learn some good characters of the protagonist and develop closer parent-child relationship.Children’s limited cognitive level and understanding ability require the translator to take children in the first place in translation process.The reception aesthetics theory,which is reader-oriented,focuses on the interaction and relationship between text and readers.From this perspective,the theory can be used as the guidance of children’s literature translation which emphasizes the recognition of children readers.During this translation practice,the major difficulty lies in the meet of children’s horizon of expectation in the target text.To solve this problem and further achieve the fusion of horizon between children readers and the target text,the translator chooses domestication translation strategy which gives more attention to target readers.Thanks to the enlightenment gained from related references and parallel texts,the translator frequently uses modal particles in the target text to imitate the speech styles of children,uses many reduplicated words to strengthen the rhythmic aesthetics in the target text and uses additional translation method and annotation in the target text to facilitate the understanding process and enlarge the horizon of children.All these methods aim to stimulate children’s emotional experience,achieve the fusion of horizon between them and the target text.After this translation practice,the translator has strengthened the understanding of reception aesthetics theory,attained more insights on children literature translation and built a solid foundation for the future work and study.