Application Of Functionalist Theory To E-C Translation Of Children’s Picture Storybooks

As a unique type of children’s literature, children’s picture storybooks are a distinctive part with its features like:the combination of visual elements and textual elements and special target readers. Reading children’s picture storybooks helps to cultivate children’s linguistic ability, promote children’s psychological development and enhance children’s cognitive and creative ability. Children’s picture storybooks have become the major reading material for a increasing number of children although with its short history in China. With the growing focus on children’s education, introducing and translating children’s picture storybooks have become increasingly popular in China in recent years. However, Children’s picture storybooks’ translation has not draw enough attention from translators, and theoretical studies on the translation of children’s picture storybooks are limited. It is a demanding job to translate children’s picture storybooks. Translators have to know clearly the intellectual and psychological features of children readers and deal with the complicated visual-textual interplay and sound-form-sense interplay. But at present, a great quantity of translating versions of children’s picture storybooks are of poor quality, which mistakes authors’ intention and fail to display the connotation and meaning of source texts. This will bring a great lose to children’s reading. This thesis is an attempt to draw the attention from the society to children’s picture storybooks’ translation and probes into the translation of children’s picture storybooks under the guidance of functionalist approaches in order to make modest means to children’s picture storybooks’ translation.German functionalist approaches contain a large structure of theories, which have the possibility to provide all-around and comprehensive theoretical support for the translation of children’s picture storybooks. According to text typology proposed by Reiss, Skopostheorie put forward by HansVermeer and Nord’s functional model of literary communication across culture barriers and skopos suggestions and function plus loyalty principle, children’s picture storybooks belong to audio-visual text, and children’s picture storybooks’ translation is a skopos-driven, children-oriented action, a loyalty-required action and an across-culture-barrier action. By analyzing Leo Lionni’s Caldecott Medal-honored works Swimmy and Frederick and their translated versions, the thesis draws the conclusion that children’s picture storybooks’ translation should emphasize the visual-text interplay, sound-form-sense interplay. And translators should take corresponding translating strategies, such as free-translation supplemented by literal-translation, domestication supplemented by foreignization, to match the function of the source text and realize senders’ intention in the target language. In addition, the thesis proposes essential techniques in children’s picture storybooks translation: division, restructuring, conversion, addition and deletion.