A Practice Report On Chinese-English Translation From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Guizhou’s ethnic landscape culture is an important part of China’s culture,and its magnificent natural landscape and profound minority culture have attracted the attention of the world.The selected text of this translation practice,Beautiful Mountains and Rivers: A Miao Writer’s Journey to Guizhou,is an essay recording rural life in Guizhou,which mainly publicizes the beautiful landscape of Guizhou and includes an introduction to the customs and cultures of Guizhou ethnic minorities.Translator chooses this text,hoping that foreign readers can appreciate the beauty of Guizhou’s mountains and rivers as well as the culture of Guizhou’s ethnic minorities.It is expected to play a positive role in promoting Guizhou’s landscape culture to go out,enhancing China’s cultural soft power and telling the story of Guizhou’s landscape in China.The original text belongs to Chinese prose.Due to the differences in vocabulary,sentence patterns,texts and rhetoric between Chinese and English prose,the translator needs to take the reader’s acceptance into account.The theory of reception aesthetics emphasizes the reader’s central position,takes the reader’s expectation horizon and reception ability as important factors,and fully mobilizes the reader’s aesthetic experience,which has a guiding and reference role in prose translation practice.Under the guidance of reception aesthetics,the translator exposes the overlapping words in the original text,the long loose sentences in Chinese and the hidden logic in the text from the perspective of satisfying readers’ expectation,making the translation more readable.Then,from the perspective of breaking through readers’ expectation,this paper analyzes how to deal with the translation of culturally loaded words and historical materials and poetry quotations.Translators mainly adopt translation techniques such as addition,division,omission,literal translation and annotation,as well as free translation.This translation practice is a positive response to the background of pushing Chinese culture to the world stage,which is of positive significance to enriching the guidance of reception aesthetics theory to prose translation practice,and at the same time deepening the translator’s understanding of the guidance of reception aesthetics theory to Chinese prose translation.