A Report On The Chinese Translation Of The Sheltered Life(Excepts)

The translated material was excerpted from the first chapter of The Sheltered Life published in 1932.The Sheltered Life was known as Ellen Glasgow's "the most moving and penetrating novel." The novel deeply reflected how the old society of the southern America was impacted by industrialization and how it crashed at that time,which had a profound impact on American literature as well as the world literature.H.R.Jauss and W.Iser's Reception Aesthetic theory originated in Germany in1960 s.According to Reception Aesthetics,literary works can only provide a multi-level framework,among which there are many blank dots.And “meaning blank” is one of the concepts of the theory.Based on Reception Aesthetic theory,this paper explains some features of lexis,syntax and discourse of The Sheltered Life on the perspective of meaning blanks.Some problems that the translator met in the process of the translation was analyzed,such as the meaning blank of the source text caused by polysemy,vacancy of vocabulary,cultural divergences and Black English.This report,at the lexical,syntactic and textural level,presents meaning blanks of adjectives,verbs and nouns;of the Black English,simple sentences and complex sentences;of cohesion and coherence.And it focuses on the solution,namely the filling mechanism of meaning blank.Considering The Sheltered Life as its research object,and on the basis of Reception Aesthetic Theory,the paper discussed relevant translation strategies,such as free translation,paraphrase,foreignizing translation and domestication translation.Writing the report,the author hopes to give those who work on literary translation a hand.