Literary Translation From The Functionalist Perspective

This thesis is an attempt to apply functionalism to literary translation and prove its feasibility by analyzing Zhang Guruo's Chinese translation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Functionalism is a broad term for various theories that approach translation by focusing on the function or functions of texts and translations. And the four important representatives of functionalism are Katharina Reiss, Hans J. Vermeer, Justa Holz-M?ntt?ri and Christiane Nord. Put forward by Vermeer, skopostheorie has played a major role in functionalist theories. There are three core rules of skopostheorie– skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. Many critics normally accept that functionalism works for translation of operating instructions, news texts, advertisements and the like and welcome adaptive procedures and even substitutions, paraphrases, omissions, expansions, etc. in the translation of these kinds of texts. However, literary translators or scholars interested in literary translation often hold doubts on the applicability of functionalism to literary translation, as in literary translation the translator is usually expected to transfer not only the message of the source text but also the specific way the message is expressed in the source language. An ideal translation would then have the same function and effect as the source text. All these demands can be subsumed under the concept of "equivalence" in its widest sense. While the thesis attempts to apply the core rules of skopostheorie– skopos rule and fidelity rule– to analyze Zhang Guruo's translation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, in the hope of gaining a better understanding of literary translation from the perspective of functionalism.