A Study On The English Translation Of Love In A Fallen City From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

As one of the works included in “Penguin Classics”,Love in a Fallen City translated by Karen S.Kingsbury keeps a balance between maintaining the essence of Eileen Chang’s original version and satisfying the aesthetic needs of Western readers.Reception Theory reveals the process of how literary works are accepted by the readership.Combined with translation studies,Reception Theory reveals relations between the original texts,translators and readers,deeply widening the scope of reception research directing at promoting literary works abroad.Based on the phenomenon that Love in a Fallen City is widely accepted by the reading public in the West,the reader-oriented Reception Theory can effectively illuminate the receptive features and principles reflected in the English rendition.The objective of this thesis is to explore the acceptability of the translated text on the basis of analyses of translation features in Love in a Fallen City.In Reception Theory,indeterminacy,fusion of horizons and aesthetic distance are closely related to the translation of literary text.Thus,in the main body of this thesis,the case study involves the three aspects: indeterminacy(the primary stage of dealing with potential factors that influence the readability),fusion of horizons(the basic part of promoting the understanding of phrases in the text)and the manipulation of aesthetic distance(the relatively advanced phase in which the aesthetic comprehension of the overall context is analyzed).Qualitative analysis is applied in the thesis to dissect the reception process of the translated text,revealing the effect of translation.The research shows that: firstly,corresponding translation strategies are utilized to deal with different places of indeterminacy in a literary text and consequently promote target readers’ acceptance;secondly,readers’ understanding of the meaning and verbal form of basic phrases in a literary text varies in different degrees.The process of forming readers’ understanding is the dynamic process of accepting the text;thirdly,as for the literary work translated from another language,in order to maintain the aesthetic comprehension within a reasonable range,narrowing aesthetic distance is more frequently utilized than widening aesthetic distance;fourthly,the compatible system constructed by “indeterminacy”,“fusion of horizons” and “aesthetic distance” provides a progressive paradigm for translation research.