On Rationalities Of Fu Donghua's Translation Of Gone With The Wind From A Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Gone with the Wind was written by an American writer Margret Mitchell, the book is one of the world's best sellers. Fu Donghua was the first translator to be invited to translate the novel in 1940s. But his translation work is the most influential and controversial. Some criticized unfaithfulness of his translation; others criticized his way of translation. All these fragment reviews above are lack of a scientific and objective evaluation of Fu Gonghua's translation. Skopos Theory has 3 rules for evaluating translation:skopos rule, coherent rule and fidelity rule. Besides Skopos Theory takes serious factors into consideration during process of translation, such as culture, the intention of the target readers and regards translation as a purposeful activity, Skopos Theory considers that translation process and strategies are determined by skopos made by translator but constrained by target text. Thus it provides a new angle for translation study.My study tries to see rationalities of Fu Donghua's Gone with the Wind from perspective of Skopos Theory. The paper figures some important factors out when Fu Donghua did his translation of Gone with the Wind in 1940s:Margret Mitchell's intention of writing, readers' requirements for Gone with the Wind, era's preference for classic Chinese, translator's political ideologies and patronage's demands for profits etc. Those factors influenced Fu Donghua's mind, all of which became his skopos of translation respectively:he had skopo to respect original author, to make the version popular and understandable, to inspire compatriots and avoid political persecution, the economic skopos required him to make his version readable so as to gain profits. Because of those skopos, Fu Donghua took domestication as his major translation strategy, finally he succeeded in achieving his goal--the popularity of his translation of Gone with the Wind in China. Bearing those skopos in his mind, Fu Donghua's translation conforms to the skopos rule; When Fu Donghua translated Gone with the Wind, he took Margret Mitchell and readers'requirements into account, so he conforms fidelity rule; he used domestication as his main translation strategy to make his version readable and smooth at that time, this conforms to coherent rule of Skopos Theory. Domestication was used as a tool to realize his skopos, this kind of translation strategy had its rationality, it is out of question that the version is successful, it had its rationalities in 1940s from the perspective of Skopos Theory. Obviously, these severe criticisms exist deficiency, as for a past version, we should respect its value in 1940s.Besides the introduction and conclusion, the paper consists of 4 parts mainly, chapter 2 is the literature review of Skopos Theory and translation of Gone with the Wind both at home and abroad. Chapter 3 is theoretical foundation for the research which includes a brief introduction of Skopos Theory. Chapter 4 is the case study under Skopos Theory, like some factors, purposes, skopos and translation strategies made by the translator. The case study is at all levels from lexical to contextual; to make points much clearer, the paper also adopts some examples from Chen Liangting's version of Gone with the Wind which was done in 1990s.