On The Two Chinese Versions Of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland In Light Of Skopostheorie

Great accomplishment has been achieved in the study of translation of children's literature, with the emphasis on the children-oriented translation, which declares that the only qualified translation of children's literature is the one that can attract children's interest.According to the skopostheorie, a translation is determined by its skopos. In this thesis, translation of children's literature will be studied in the light of the skopostheorie instead of the children-orientation. The Skopostheorie takes the translated literature into consideration that has formerly been excluded by children-oriented translation, and offers an objective evaluation. In the three-chapter exploration into two translation versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, great efforts have been made to understand the differences in the two translations in the light of skopostheorie.Yuen Ren Chao aims to entertain children readers while Wu Juntao intends to reproduce the enchantment of the classic literature for both adults and children readers. In the second chapter, "Purpose of Target Text and the Translation of Cultural Images and Stylistic Features", the author analyzes the two translations from two perspectives, namely, cultural images and stylistic features. By domesticating cultural images, Chao makes the translation readable and helps children enjoy the fairy tales. By adopting the strategy of foreignizing, Wu adheres to the original expressions that take the readers to an alien place. On the translation of stylistic features, the author pays attention to the children speech in Chao's version and adult speech in Wu's version. Translated in a colloquial style which conforms to children's comprehensibility perfectly, Chao's version fully meets children's reading need. In Wu's version, the language with children's characteristics is rare and the literary Chinese makes the translation both eloquent and elegant.In the third chapter, "Purpose of Target Text and Translation of Humorous Discourse", the author concentrates on the translation of puns and nonsense verses, which are two main resources of humor. In translating puns, Chao translates the pun in the source text by another pun on a word with a different but associated meaning, and thus fulfills his translating purpose of entertaining the readers. However, in Wu's translation, puns have been translated literally and further explained with footnotes. Readers cannot understand the pun until they read the footnotes. Here the version not only sounds humorous, but also successfully reveals to the readers how pun works in English. It greatly enriches the readers' knowledge and meets the expectations of adult readers and some children who are keen on learning.The same is true with the translation of nonsense verse. Chao reproduces feet at the cost of the loyalty to part of the content, thus adding meter to the translated verse and making it superior to the source text in readability. Wu's version remains both the content and the feet, and shows preference for the remaining of the content when it is in conflict with feet. In this thesis, the author draws a conclusion that these two translation versions can be given a fair evaluation in the light of skopostheorie, which helps us out of the embarrassment that some wonderful translation versions might be excluded from research in the light of children-orientation.