A Study Of The Chinese Translation Of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone: A Perspective Of Skopostheorie

This paper is a study of the Chinese version of Harry Potter and thePhilosopher's Stone in the light of Skopostheorie.For centuries, translation theory and practice cannot get rid of the dominant ideaof "faithfulness" or "equivalence". The translator has always been wandered about thedilemma between metaphrase and flee translation and tried in vain to meet both sides.Skopostheorie, born in the mid-to-late 1970s, a theoretical revolution in contemporarytranslation studies, regards translation action as a purposeful intercultural action. TheSkopostheorie states that translation actions all have specific purposes, whichdetermine the whole process of translation. The Skopostheofie concentrates on theSkopos rule, Coherence rule and Fidelity rule with the Skopos rule predominating.Skopostheorie provides a unique criterion for the assessment of the translationadequacy, which refers to the qualities of a TT with regard to the translation brief.Based on Skopostheorie, a descriptive-explanatory method along with a casestudy is adopted in this research. The history of the study of Skopostheorie isreviewed firstly, from which the aspects, the three key rules and its merits anddemerits are all revealed. After a brief historical overview of how skopos-orienedconcepts come into being, the author begins to uncover the language and rhetoricalfeatures in the ST and TT through the study of ST and TT. The result is that the TT issimilar to the ST both in language and rhetorical features. How about the relationshipbetween the ST and TT in content? Then the author makes a comparison between theST and TT under the rules of Skopostheorie, i.e. Skopos rule, Coherence rule, Fidelityrule. From the comparison, the author finds out that the skopos of TT is similar to theskopos of ST that's why the TT is similar to the ST both in the language and rhetoricalfeatures. The TT does well in intracoherence but makes some mistakes inintercoherence. Considering that the skopos of TT is to introduce the story to Chinesereaders and actually the book sells well, so it still can be believed as an adequate rendition for it has achieved its skopos.