In Chinese translation history, the translator's roles were almost totally neglected. Dao'an(314-385),one of the best-known Buddhist translators in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, advocated literal translation. He insisted that translators of Buddhist sutras should "follow the source text closely without missing a single word, and change nothing except for inverted word order"(Luo Xinzhang 2).In the late Qing Dynasty, Yan Fu put forward his famous three-character principle of translation: faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance, which still exerts great influence on the translation study and practice today. To be faithful to the original is already very difficult, and yet a translation faithful but not expressive cannot be counted as translation at all. Therefore, expressiveness has to be given enough weight to. However, revolutionists such as Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai audaciously challenged the traditional principles of translation during the time when vernacular was used to replace classic Chinese. With the purpose to enrich the target language and preserve the exotic flavor, cultural revolutionists preferred literal translation, maintaining that "faithfulness" should have priority over "smoothness". With the "cultural turn" of translation study from the linguistic perspective to the cultural perspective, in creasing emphasis has been placed on the subjectivity of literary translation and the subjective initiative on the part of the translator. In recent years, there are many scholars who writing papers and doing special studies on translators in China, Yang Wuneng took the first tentative step in the application of reception aesthetics into translation studies in 1987 with his article The Circulation of Hermeneutics Reception and Recreation. According to Xia Zhongyi(1998),literary translation in essence is reading and receiving and the translator makes the choice after comparing different possible interpretations.(Xia Zhongyi 14)In 2000,Ma Xiao wrote "Literary Translation from the Perspective of Reception Theory", discussing translation process and the translator's role. Guo Benrong(2004) also maintained that the translation version doesn't just "imitate" the original and the translator doesn't just translate from one language to another. Zhao Hongwei(2006)sorted out the translator's roles in the great jungle of culture and literature as a reader, a writer, a researcher and a hermit in his paper. The discussions about the translator appeared in different periods in the history of translation studies in the West. The famous ancient Roman translator Marcus Tullius Cicero proposed ”flexible translation”, which means that the translator should, like an orator, represent foreign works with expressions that conform to the idiomatic language usage of the ancient Romans, so as to trigger the interest and sympathy on the part of the target reader or the audience.(Tan Zaixi 2000 23-24).Benjamin(1923)once wrote: ” The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect(intention) upon the language into which he is translating and which produces in it the echo of the original”(Benjamin 20).The translator#8217;s status is promoted to a great extent in many contemporary views. Some new translation theories in the west, such as Feminism Theory, Post Colonialism Theory, Hermeneutics, the American Translation Workshop and Deconstruction theory in the 1960s attach much importance to the translator#8217;s roles. All theses theories lay stress on the subjectivity of the translator from different angles. With the development of theses new theories in the west, more and more attention has been paid to the active and dynamic roles of the translator in the translation process. The American Translation Workshop came into being in the 1960s, which has shown that the translated text seems to have its own life. American translation theorist Lawrence Venuti(1998) insisted upon the creativity of the translator and upon his or her visible presence in a translation. According to Venuti, with its allegiance both to source and target cultures, translation ”is a reminder that no act of interpretation can be definitive” (Venuti 46). The five tendencies in the 1960s, namely, Russian Formalism, Prague Structuralism, the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden, Hans-Georg Gadamer#8217;s hermeneutics and the ”sociology of literature”, brought about a dense academic atmosphere in which the German aesthetics of reception could boom. The theory with fresh viewpoints sheds new lights on literary translation and criticism. The major representatives of reception aesthetics are German literary historians and theorists Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. Wolfgang Iser emphasizes that the concretization of a literary work relies on the reader#8217;s active participation emphasizes that the concretization of a literary work relies on the reader#8217;s active participation in concretizing the ”indeterminacy” and in filling in ”blanks of meaning” during the reception process. In 1980s, Functional Equivalence Theory was introduced into China and attracted great interest of Chinese translation theorists. Many scholars have done research on this theory, which provides guidelines for literary translation. Tan Zaixi(1999) introduced the shaping process of Nida#8217;s translation theories in his Nida#8217;s Translation Theory, including the major categories of linguistics and the concepts of social semiotics.