Look From The Skopos Theory Of Children's Literature Translation: Case Study Of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone Translation Comparison

The flourishing contemporary western translation theories provide new perspectives for the translation studies. Among these theories, Skopostheory raised by German scholars is unique. Skopostheory, developed by Hans Vermeer, gets rid of the shackles of the equivalence theory, and focuses upon the purpose of the translation process and highlights the importance of the target readers. Therefore, it can compensate for the deficiencies of the traditional translation studies, and provide a new perspective for the field of translation.This paper aims to introduce Skopostheory into the translation of children’s literature, so as to study whether the foreign children’s literature translation works in Chinese book market are in accord with children’s understanding ability and points of interest or they are as obscure as adults’literature. This paper will use the mainland and Taiwan editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to analyze comparatively that whether they have pertained to specific group of readers like children, and whether they make the translation works more attractive to children oy the means such as the choice of simple words.This paper is divided into five parts:the first part is the overall introduction of the paper; the second part recounts the development, definitions, principles and the important translation theorists of Skopostheory; the third part is the introduction of children’s literature, which separately describes the characteristics and definition of children’s literature; the fourth part compare the mainland and Taiwan editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone with the characteristics of children’s literature as the analytical dimensions to show if they serve the target children readers as the translating purpose; and the last part is conclusion which gives the summary of the whole paper and clarifies the research results.