On The Translation Of Fictional Texts From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics ——A Case Study Of Portrait Of A Scotsman

This translation project was guided by the Reception Theory,focusing on target readers.To fulfill aesthetic requirements of target readers,the translator ought to make blanks in the source text comprehensible and consider target readers’expected perspectives.The text of this translation practice is selected from Portrait of a Scotsman,the author of which argues that women should consider their self-social value as the starting point to achieve happiness.And that topic is popular among women readers in China.The translator tried to explain source text blanks in character image,sentence semantics and emotional coherence.In the process of English-Chinese translation,source text blanks are usually caused by the lack of proper or accurate words in Chinese,unclear objects the pronoun referring to and differences between two cultural backgrounds.This paper analyzes some of those cases from the aspects of vocabulary,sentences and discourse under Reception aesthetics,which proposes to make the translation readable for target readers.In addition,the translator should adopt different translation strategies to meet directional and innovative expectation horizons of target readers.This paper summarizes that domestication strategy can be used to evoke target readers’emotion to meet their directional expectations.What’s more,the readers’ innovative expectations lie in the part beyond their original cognition,so the foreignization strategy is more inclined to be used to bring target readers into a foreign culture.In brief,this paper summarizes some translation methods and strategies to meet target readers’ expectations and aesthetic requirements and offers some referring cases in the novel translation.