Translation Of Pronouns In English Novels From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

The Promise by Damon Galgut,a South African playwright and novelist,is a family novel with rich content.For this book,which is characterized by exquisite writing techniques and profound humanistic care,Galgut was awarded the 2021 Booker Prize,one of the top prizes in the contemporary world of English novels.The masterpiece depicts a broken family and a desperate country in a sharp tone.Through a series of funeral scenes,the book narrates a story of dispute between Swart family,descendants of Dutch immigrants,and their black servant Salome.The prize-winning novel reflects South Africa’s hard process of transition from an apartheid society to a multi-ethnic democratic one and explores the interconnected relationship between family members.With the family as a miniature society,the author expresses national protest against indelible racism as well as his reflections on the racist system or legacy in South Africa.The translation report is based upon the second part of The Promise.Breaking through the author’s past narrative model of using one character as a central figure,this novel adopts a polycentric technique in the narrative and presents different voices in distinctive and personalized language.Pronouns are used quite frequently.Due to the differences between English and Chinese in pronouns,proper translation of pronouns has become a key issue in the translation process as well as a prominent problem in revision and correction.Hence,this report focuses on the translation techniques of pronouns,especially personal pronouns,demonstrative pronouns and interrogative pronouns,aiming to achieve better coherence and cohesion on the syntactic and textual levels.The translation practice enables the translator to gain a deeper understanding of the prize-winning novel,summarize the difficulties and explore the translation of pronouns guided by the Skopos theory,pushing the discussion up to a theoretical level and giving the translator some ideas about an ideal translation deeper understanding of literary translation,novel translation in particular.The concept of Skopos theory is that the most important factor in the process of translation is the purpose of the whole translation act.The three principles of Skopos Theory,namely,the skopos rule,the coherence rule and the fidelity rule are the general principles to be followed in the translation.Under the guidance of Skopos theory,the author uses various translation methods,such as omission,literal translation and reduction,to achieve the best expression of the translation.Moreover,because this book has the characteristics of stream of consciousness,and there are many characters in the book,the author chooses to narrate in the third person rather than focusing on a central character in the previous novel.The free floating narration makes the conversion of personal pronouns frequent,which brings great difficulties and challenges to the author during translation.Therefore,the author chooses pronouns as the starting point,and takes Skopos theory as the guiding principle,and strives to convey the original text to the readers faithfully and accurately,to achieve the best communicative purpose,so that Chinese readers can obtain better reading experience.This practice report consists of five chapters.The first chapter introduces the background and significance of the task,as well as research purpose and significance.The second chapter briefly introduces preparations before translation,translation process and post-translation revision and correction.The third chapter is the literature review,focusing mainly on contrastive studies of pronouns in English and Chinese and the Skopos theory.The fourth chapter is the core of the report,discussing the problems concerning pronouns that the author has encountered during translation and proposing corresponding solutions to these problems.The fifth chapter is the summary and reflection on this translation practice,in the hope of providing some reference for the translation of pronouns.