A Report On The Translation Of Chinese American Fiction From The Perspective Of Horizon Of Expectation ——A Case Study Of Our Wayward Fate(Excerpt)

Since Yan Phou Lee published his autobiography When I Was a Boy in China in1887,Chinese American literature has experienced more than 100 years of history（Cheng,2003:46）.Different from other types of fictions,Chinese American fictions,being an important part of Chinese American literature,often contain not only American culture,but also Chinese culture.The translation material of this report is selected from Our Wayward Fate,a representative work of Chinese American writer Gloria Chao.The fiction is about a Chinese American girl who received American education since childhood and made different choices between family and love under the influence of the two different cultures.There are 460,000 words in Our Wayward Fate,10,008 of which has been translated by the author,and two different text features are summarized as follows: first,as a Chinese American fiction,Our Wayward Fate contains a large number of cross-cultural terms,such as culture-loaded words;second,from the perspective of the differences between Chinese and English expressions,the original text has obvious differences in word order,syntax and other aspects.This report adopts the theory of “horizon of expectation” put forward by the German aesthetician Jauss to guide the translation work.The theory is reader-centered and emphasizes readers’ experience,such as cultural background,language use and aesthetic appreciation towards language.After a comprehensive analysis of the writing features of the the source text,the author chooses corresponding strategies for the parts featuring different cultures such as cultural-loaded words and other parts with distinct language expression characteristics such as long sentences in the the source text from readers’ expectations of cultural background,language expressions and aesthetic appreciation.In the approach to different cultural background acceptance,the author considers the reader’s receptivity to some sensitive words and the ability to understand words or sentences with cultural characteristics in the the source text,and adopts the strategies of implicitation,explicitation and domestication;in dealing with distinctive language expression of the two cultures,the author takes into account the readers’ language habits and chooses the strategies of long sentence division,readjustment of sentence structure and amplification.In terms of different aesthetic acceptance,the readers’ expectations for the beauty of rhythm and image are considered.The translation of Chinese American fiction is a special process of re-creation with multiple cultures.In this process,the author,as the intermediary between the source and the target languages,needs to ponder the diverse factors affecting readers’ reading experience,such as the expectations of the readers’ cultural background,language expression and aesthetic appreciation.Meanwhile,the differences and characteristics of the two cultures and the two languages should be understood so that the fiction could be translated from where readers stand.