German Functionalist Approaches To Zheng Zhenduo’s Translation Of Tagore’s Poetry

Nurtured by many other scientific theories in relevant fields, translation theories have developed significantly in the past50years. The introduction of multiple disciplines indeed promotes a better development on translation studies; however, translation theories nourished by these disciplines show their limitations with a further study on them. Therefore, a comprehensive theory is urgently needed, which can not only take into consideration all factors involved in translation activities but is applicable to guide translation practice.In light of this, the skopos rule put forward by functionalist is a breakthrough towards the equivalence theory. Different from traditional "faithfulness", functionalism broadens the range of translatability and increase translation strategies which is close to daily life. Few people adopt the theory to analyze Zheng Zhenduo’s poetry translation. The skopos rule suggests that translation activity should obey the translation purpose, which serves a significant guiding for poetry translation.The study proves the value of functionalism in poetry translation. Skopos could help translators choose conductive methods to realize translation requirements and aim. Translators will use beneficial methods to generate the text to achieve the purpose. This study intends to study the translation of Tagore’s poetry by Zheng Zhenduo. On the one hand, it refutes the view holding that functionalism is not applicable for literary translation. On the other hand, it provides a perspective for researchers on Zheng’s translation of Tagore’s poetry.The thesis is separated into five parts. Chapter one is the introduction part, which presents the research background, research significance, research methodology and layout of the thesis. Chapter two is literature review, previous studies on functionalism as well as Tagore’s poetry and Zheng Zhenduo’s translation are demonstrated in this part. Chapter three is an elaborate introduction to functionalism which serves as a theoretical foundation for this paper where Hans Vermeer’s Skopos theory is introduced. Chapter four, the core part of this thesis, is devoted to applying functionalism to the translation of Tagore’s poetry from the aspects of translation purpose, target readers and translation strategies. Chapter five draws conclusions of this paper and puts forward the shortage of this research.