Translator’s Horizon of Expectations and the Inevitability of Retranslation of Literary Works

Horizon of expectations, as a core concept in Reception Aesthetics, provides a new methodological basis for literary translation. Owing to this theory, literary translation is no longer a one-way process which is text-centered and transmitted by a translator with readers passively accepting everything, but an ever-going dialogic process between translator and the literary work, and between translator and implied readers, which results in the necessity, possibility and even sometimes inevitability of retranslation of literary works. Horizons of expectations widen people's space of cognition for retranslation of literary works.