Reception of the Goldblatt’s Translation of Red Sorghum from the Perspective of Reception Aesthetics for Overseas Readers

Abstract

Literary translation must meet readers’ aesthetic needs and acceptance psychology for literary works. At the same time, the quality of translation should not only be judged by the source text, but also by the acceptance of readers. Reception aesthetics is a theoretical system that takes readers as the center to study the effect of text acceptance. This paper selects Red Sorghum translated by Howard Goldblatt as the research object, collects readers’ comments on this translation from foreign book review websites (www.goodreads.com), and uses the theory of reception aesthetics to analyze the acceptance of this translation among English readers, aiming to provide more ideas for the translation of Chinese literary works.