Readers’ Receptive Psychology of Literary Translation from the Perspective of Psycholinguistics—A Case Study of 1984

Abstract

Psycholinguistics, a product of the combination of psychology and linguistics, studies the psychological cognition of human speech behavior. Literary translation is a kind of speech act, and the psychological activities generated by readers when reading literary translation works are the psychological cognitive process of language, which is mainly manifested as readers’ acceptance psychology. Readers’ reception psychology and psycholinguistics both emphasize the concept of expectation horizon. Based on this, the expectation horizon of the two intersected fields can be divided into three levels: stylistic expectation, character expectation and artistic expectation. Taking 1984 as an example, this paper attempts to interpret the readers’ reception psychology from the perspective of psycholinguistics by combining the four dimensions of author, translator, work and reader.