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5.1 Filling of Blanks in the Target Text

As the reader of the original text first, the translator found the blanks within it.For the blanks that are too abstract, ambiguous or foreign, the translator was prone tofill them with a proper interpretation based on her own knowledge about Chineseculture and creative imagination.

This is a scenery description at the beginning of the fiction. In the original textthe writer uses an abstract word“萧索”, which means lacking vitality and life force,so as to create a desolate and chilly atmosphere for the story. As the adjective“萧索”just describes the surroundings set in OX Village where main characters live from amacro-level, it’s difficult for readers to draw a specific picture in their mind withoutany concrete details. The translator turns to micro-level narrations of such details likethe branches and long bleak shadows in the target text, which are more imaginableand perceptible for readers.

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Conclusion

Major Findings

Through this tentative case study on A Hero Born from the perspective ofReception Aesthetics, the translation strategies adopted can be concluded as follows

:Firstly, in terms of readers’ “Horizon of Expectation”, efforts are made in twoaspects: language and culture. Seen from the linguistic level, taking the difference ofChinese and English languages in aspects like sounds, words, sentences and discourseinto consideration, the translator adopts the strategy of domestication at phonetic,lexical, syntactic and textual levels to adapt to the target language and make the textmore readable, such as conversion of part of speech words, adaptation of tightnessand repetition of the sentences , rearrangement of order of paragraphs and omission ofcontent; and seen from the cultural level, faced with the truth that there is so muchcultural information consisting of Chinese idioms, sayings and historical allusions, thetranslator endeavors to achieve a balanced amount of cultural information bythoughtfully combining the strategies of domestication and foreignization.Specifically speaking, more domestication is applied for idioms, more foreignizationfor historical allusions and rough equality in domestication and foreignization forsayings. A balanced amount of cultural information enables readers to feel thefreshness of foreign culture and also makes them free of a reading barrier. Then, interms of “Fusion of Horizons”, apart from the (mata)text itself, the translator alsopays attention to paratext (peritext and epitext), supplementary information centeredon the text, to accomplish fusion of horizons between the text and its readers to thefullest. Lastly, in terms of “Appealing Structure” of the text, the translator manages tointensify such a structure through filling, preserving and creating blanks in the targettext during the process of translation.

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