The article examines the importance of the reading process in translation, explaining the function of two different reading stances, aesthetic and efferent. The author applies Rosenblatt’s trans-active reading theory to the reading process in translation, using his own experience of translating a Chinese short story into English. According to Rosenblatt, the meaning of a text is only formed when the reader transacts with the writer by sharing their psychological, social, and language experience through reading. Hence, different purposes of reading in various stages of translation affect greatly the reading process and the interpretation of the text. During the first reading the author was led into an aesthetic living-through experience; in the second, he had to adopt a more distanced, more efferent stance to search for the implied tone and mood of the work. The re-reading of both the Chinese and the English texts after translation requires both efferent and aesthetic stances for a linguistic as well as an artistic evaluation.