On Translator’s Subjectivity In Translating Martial Arts Fictions From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Martial arts fictions,featuring enchanting storyline and abundant cultural connotations,are a significant milestone in Chinese literature,making this genre a perfect candidate for translation.However,such charm also poses huge challenges to translators.It takes their initiative to work out the solution to possible problems,which displays their subjectivity.Also,unlike traditional literary theories,Reception Aesthetics shifts the focus from text and author to the reader,opening new doors to translation studies.Given the success of Legends of the Condor Heroes and its translators’ stress on readers in their interviews,this thesis,taking the first two volumes of the series as cases,probes into translator’s subjectivity in rendering martial arts fictions from the perspective of Reception Aesthetics to shed light for future translation of this genre and help extend the influence of Chinese literature around the globe.This study finds the two translators’ subjectivity,under Reception Aesthetics,resides in the two identities they take on in translation activities.As source-text readers,they display their subjectivity in Holmwood’s selection of She Diao out of personal interests and their understanding of the book via their horizon of expectation.As targettext creators,they exhibit their subjectivity in the concern for readers’ horizon of expectation in translation,or directed expectation and creative expectation.To satisfy readers’ directed expectation,they exhibit overt inclination for domestication at structural and linguistic levels;for creative expectation,the two manifest obvious tendency for foreignization.Specifically,the former entails paratexts,rearrangement of inter-volume,intra-chapter,and intra-paragraph divisions,content reordering,plus source-text-based addition,omission,and variation translation,whereas the latter refers to adopting the foreignization-dominant strategy to render most culture-loaded words.The above findings suggest: in the translation process,the two translators,bearing readers’ directed expectation and creative expectation in mind,seek to guarantee their renditions are target-language-oriented in structure and language by employing targetreader-friendly forms and expressions,and are source-language-based in culture by reserving most cultural images.In this way,assisted by occasional domestication,the readability and cultural features of this genre are retained,and readers’ horizon of expectation is also met.Therefore,the two volumes can be rated as successful models,offering instructions for future martial arts fiction translators.