Translation Of Children’s Literature Under The Guidance Of Reception Aesthetics Theory

This report is based on Halfway to Harmony by Barbara O’Connor,a famous American author for children.There are 42 chapters in all,which tells a story about growing up,friendship,courage in readily understandable words.Considering that the readers of children’s literature are still in the primary stage of language learning,the translator needs to give full consideration to their reception ability,language expression habits,thinking patterns and aesthetic preferences.Only in this way can the acceptability of translation works will be improved and the children readers will be more willing to read.Hans Robert Jauss,as the representative of the Reception Aesthetics Theory,advocates reader-centered concept,which breaks through one-sidedness of simply concern the source text and the writer in reading activity.The theory underlines the role of readers and focuses on the feelings of readers in the whole literary activity.Guided by the theory of Reception Aesthetics,this report are six chapters in all.The relevant language strategies are discussed from the lexical,syntactic,rhetorical and cultural levels respectively.At the lexical level,the beauty of the text is reflected by the use of colloquial,reduplicative,onomatopoeic and rhyming words.At the syntactic level,it helps children readers to clarify their logic and deepen their understanding by converting long sentences into short sentences and completing sentence meaning.At the rhetorical level,the use of simile,personification and parallelism makes the content of the text become vivid,and enhances children readers’ interest of reading.At the cultural level,the aesthetic vision of children readers is expanded through cultural interpretation and positive expression.Through the analysis of the four aspects,the author intends to help children readers of the target language to understand the ideas of the original work better.By writing the translation report,especially the part of case analysis,the author is more convinced that the Reception Aesthetics is a highly effective theory to guide the translation of children’s literature.Meanwhile,the author would like to do translation with the combination of this theory and children’s literature,and endeavour to produce high-quality works.