A Contrastive Study Of Functionalist Approaches To Translation Of Charlotte's Web

As a branch of literature, children's literature shares the common features of literature, but it also has special features, which are caused by children's cognitive features, language features and psychological development. The literatures both at home and abroad are important spiritual food of children. Many excellent children's literary works are imported, some of which are retranslated and republished again and again. New foreign works are imported successively. Many children's literary works are popular among child readers. However the research on the theory about the translation of children's literature is lag behind that of other countries, which can be proved by the article published on some core magazines on translation. It seems that translation of children's literature is confined to the theory on the translation of adults'literature. This study tries to apply functionalist approaches into the translation of children's literature in order to prove that functionalist approaches can guide the translation of children's literature.In the field of children's literature, child-orientation is widely accepted. This study lists some children's books which were imported a few years ago to prove this point of view. The translation of children's literature is the reproduce of foreign literature. Therefore the translation of children's literature should also be child-oriented, which decides that features of children and children's literature ought to be taken into consideration. The functionalist approaches open a new door to translation. Functionalist approaches put the target readers in front of original authors, which is in accord with child-oriented theory. From the perspective of functionalist approaches, this thesis probes into the differences in different versions caused by translator's different purposes in order to confirm the rationality of different translation strategies and translation methods for various purposes which the translators adopt. This study tries to prove that under the guidance of functionalist approaches, the criticism criteria should not be a single one. It ought to be multiple in which translation purposes and translation strategies are taken into account so that the translation criticism can be carried out from a wider angle. From the contrastive study of three different Chinese versions of Charlotte's Web, this study analyzes the application of functionalist approaches in the translation of children's literature. Under the framework of the functionalist approaches, combining with the features of children and children's literature, this thesis makes a comparative study in detail on the differences of three versions. After that the author draws a conclusion: with different purposes, translators can adopt different strategies and methods from which their versions can benefit, which is the reason why three versions with great differences are popular among different readers.