Reader response and reception theory

Since the discipline of Translation Studies was semi-officially inaugurated three decades ago with the publication of James Holmes' well-known essay, “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’’，there have been surprisingly few studies conducted on the reading of translations, other than those of an evaluative nature done in the name of translation criticism. But just as the audience has recently come to occupy a pivotal position in communication studies, so too the real or historical reader is garnering increasing attention in Translation Studies. This reader should not be confused with the “addressee” (at whom the translation is targeted) or the translator-as-reader (who first reads the text before doing a translation). Indeed, much has been written about how translators can better serve the target addressees, i.e., readers, in the translator- oriented research that has long been dominant in the field. Text- oriented research, which constructs an image of the reader from the text, has also received a good deal of attention. The recent profusion of research on reader response and audience response in literary and cultural studios, however, has produced new methodologies and terminologies, which, when transferred to translation research, open up new possibilities for the study of the real, rather than the imagined, reader.