On The E-C Translation Of Children’s Literature From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

The translation of children’s literature not only expands the vision of domestic teenagers but also builds a communicative bridge between eastern and western culture.The text of children’s literature focuses on emotional expression,so the translation of such texts needs to be centered on children’s interest and be in accordance with their cognitive level.German scholar Hans Robert Jauss puts forward the theory of Reception Aesthetics and the concept of horizons of expectation.He thinks that in the reader-centered market,the author should take full account of the reader’s horizons of expectation and strive to cater to them so that he or she can create excellent literary works.Since translation is the process of recreating literary works,based on Reception Aesthetics,this paper will discuss several translation strategies used commonly in translating Ms.Rapscott’s Girls.All the examples in Chapter 4 are extracted from Ms.Rapscott’s Girls to illustrate translation strategies summarized by the author.The novel tells a story about a boarding school teacher,Ms.Rapscott,and a group of troublesome girls.The story is quite appealing with vivid language and tries to educate children with adventurous experience.There is a lot of dialogues in the book,so the translator needs to be very familiar with the way how children think,speak and learn.This paper will discuss several strategies for translating children’s literature and explain how to use them in order to help retain the style of the original work and to meet children’s horizons of expectation.These strategies will be analyzed from two aspects: lexical and sentential.For the lexical translation,the author focuses on the equivalence of onomatopoeia,the use of oral expressions and the application of Chinese reduplicated words and idioms;for the sentence translation,strategies such as adjusting word order,splitting long sentences,using parallelism and adding modal particles at the end of the sentence are proposed to achieve a better effect.Through this discussion,the author hopes that these strategies might shed some light on the translation of children’s literature in China in the future.