摘 要

一个人的人生观价值观不是在一天形成的，而是在每日生活中逐渐构建出来的。那么一个人的童年时期就显得尤为重要，因为这一阶段是一个人世界观形成的雏形时期。这一阶段的儿童心理特征还没有成熟，他们更喜欢通过模仿来熟悉学习外界的事物，那么每日接触到的人和事，听到的话语都会影响到他们。儿童文学读物正是他们在这一阶段世界观形成的重要工具，儿童文学翻译者通过文字的转换，将国外那些美妙的故事传递给小朋友们，让儿童摄取健康有趣的信息。接受美学以读者为中心,以读者接受为目标,它为儿童文学翻译提供了一个新的理论基础和依据。本文以接受美学为理论指导，以罗尔德·达尔所著、任溶溶先生所译的《查理和巧克力工厂》为分析文本，从词汇、句法、修辞三个层面研究儿童文学翻译的原则及策略。本文第一部分为背景介绍，第二部分主要阐述接受美学理论的主要观点，第三部分应用接受美学解读目标读者，第四部分为《查理和巧克力工厂》中的翻译策略探究，第五部分总结全文。本文旨在研究儿童文学翻译的策略，阐释接受美学如何指导儿童文学翻译，提高译作在读者中的接受度。

关键词：接受美学；儿童文学；翻译策略

Abstract

A person's world outlook and values are not formed in one day, but are gradually built up in daily life. In that way, a person's childhood seems particularly important, because this stage is the embryonic stage of a person's world outlook. The psychological characteristics of children at this stage have not yet matured, so they prefer to learn things from the outside world through imitation. Then the people and things that they come in contact with each day, the words they hear will have an impact on them. Children's literature books are an important tool for the formation of their worldview at this stage. Children's literary translators transfer the wonderful stories from abroad to children through the conversion of words, allowing children to ingest healthy and interesting information. Reception aesthetics is reader-centered which takes reader acceptance as its goal. It provides a new theoretical foundation and basis for children's literature translation. This dissertation takes the theory of reception aesthetics as the theoretical guide, analyzes the texts of the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory written by Roald Dahl, translated by Ren Rongrong, and studies the principles and strategies of children's literature translation from three levels of vocabulary, syntax and rhetoric. The first part of this paper introduces the background, and the second part mainly elaborates the main viewpoints of the theory of reception aesthetics. The third part uses the reception aesthetics to interpret the target readers. The fourth part discusses the translation strategies in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the fifth part summarizes the full text. This article aims to study the strategies of children's literature translation, explains how reception aesthetics theory guides children's literature translation, and improves the acceptance of translations among readers.

Key Words: Reception aesthetics; children’s literary; translation strategies

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Reception Aesthetics Theory 4

2.1 Reader’s horizon of expectation 4

2.2 Aesthetic distance 6

2.3 Indeterminacy in literature 6

2.4 Roles of readers 7

3 Interpretation of Target Readers under the Guidance of Reception Aesthetics Theory 9

3.1 Invisible readers and little readers 9

3.2 The expectation horizon of little readers 9

4 Translation Strategies of Charlie and Chocolate Factory under the Guidance of Reception Aesthetics Theory 11

4.1 Brief introduction to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 11

4.2 Brief introduction to the translator 11

4.3 Translation strategies of Charlie and Chocolate Factory 12

4.3.1 Vocabulary 13

4.3.2 Syntax 14

4.3.3 Rhetorics 15

5 Conclusions 16

References 17

Acknowledgments 18

On the Translation Principles and Strategies of Western Children's Literature from the Perspective of Reception Aesthetics—A Case Study of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

1 Introduction

As a kind of literary category, children's novels, due to the particularity of the target readership, have distinct and unique characters. Therefore, whether the original language style can be vividly reproduced in children's novel translation becomes an important criterion for measuring the quality of translation. In recent decades, the theory and research on literary translation have made great progress and development. However, as a branch of literary translation, translation studies on children's literature have received little attention. With the increasing closeness of international contacts, the number of children's literary works has been increasing year by year, but its overall quality is not high. The practice and theoretical development of translation of children's literary works is extremely unbalanced. Therefore, it is urgent to carry out in-depth research on the translation of children's literature and seek theoretical guidance for its practice. The purpose of this paper is to try to apply the aesthetics of reception to the study of translation of children's literature, to prove its feasibility in translation studies of children's literature, and to provide a broader perspective for the translation studies of children's literature.

Since the 1980s, the study of children's literature on a global scale has steadily risen, and it has now become a prosperous academic territory. It has presented a variety of research trends and various authoritative monographs have been published. Their research goals and focuses are varied: there are both practical and educational-driven methods, as well as experimental methods of post-structuralism and post-modernism; both text-oriented and cultural and ideological methods. There are both psychoanalytic methods that focus on individuals and sociological research methods. However, unfortunately, the attention of the translation scholars and the children’s literature research community in the translation of children’s literature has so far been insufficient. The study in this field in China has just begun, and it is basically not subject to the attention of the mainstream translation scholars in China. This is of course due to the dual marginalization of translation of children's literature. The research of domestic scholars mainly focuses on the holistic description and study of the phenomenon of translation of children's literature.

Xu Derong published a paper Translation of Children's Literature in Chinese Translation in 2004. It mainly discusses how to reproduce spoken language and playfulness from the characteristics of children's literature. The existing studies of children's literature translators mainly focus on translators such as Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Zheng Zhenxuan and others who play a fundamental role in the occurrence and development of children's literature translation. For example, Zhang Daozhen thinks that Zhou Zuoren’s many viewpoints, such as the translator’s knowledge of anthropology and the translator’s need to adjust the grammar and syntactic features of the work to be close to the child’s thoughts, are of great value. Under the influence of translation studies on children's literature abroad, many Chinese scholars have begun to consciously use the interdisciplinary perspective to study children's literary translation. For example, Hu Jun from the key term "expectation horizon" in the the acceptance theory, using the translation of "Harry Potter" as an example, discusses the influence of children's horizon of vision change on the translation of children's literature and its enlightenment.

On the whole, since the beginning of the 21st century, the study of translation of children's literature abroad has shown a flourishing scene. The scholars involved in the study are literary researchers and translation scholars. The scope of research is very extensive, the perspectives are diversified, and various theories are applied, making those researches with interdisciplinary properties. However, the current domestic research is still not enough and has not received the attention of translation scholars. In the authoritative periodical “Chinese Translation”, there was only one relevant paper in the past ten years, meanwhile the translation of children's literature was rarely seen in core journals of other foreign languages. At present, the level of domestic research is still limited, and the scope of research is not wide enough. There are too few scholars engaged in research in this field, and in particular, famous scholars.

Children's Literature is specially created for children and adolescents and has unique artistic features. The majority reader of Children’s literature are kids, whose receptivity should be considered as their like in the course of translation. Given the particularity of Children’s literature, this paper takes Roald Dahl's famous children's literature Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as an example, and bases the study on the aesthetics of acceptance, that is, the reader's status, expectation horizon, aesthetic distance, and textual uncertainty. It uses case analysis methods to conduct research. Through the combination of the acceptance of aesthetic theory and translations, this article contrasts and analyzes the language level, rhetorical level, and cultural level, so as to put forward the translation skills for children's literature. In other words, the translator should use colloquial language, simple sentence structure, visualized expression, and use of certain translation strategies to reduce cultural differences. Through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this paper explores the preservation of language beauty and the transmission of culture in the course of translation. The paper aims to make translators pay more attention to children's characteristics when translating children's literature, and should adopt proper translation strategies to improve the acceptability of translations among children's readers.

2 Reception Aesthetics Theory

In 1967, Jauss, a professor at the University of Konztans in Germany, published a discourse entitled Literary History as a challenge to Literary Theory. In the article, a well-known acceptance theory was proposed. Acceptance theory is also called acceptance aesthetics, the figures of whom are Jauss and Iser. "Audience" and "acceptance" are the core contents of the theory of acceptance, which emphasizes the reader's first role in literary works. In the theory of acceptance, "the reader is the decisive factor and active subject of text acceptance history. The reader's understanding or horizon of expectation and aesthetic ability directly affect the understanding and acceptance of the text."