A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Moment In Peking From The Perspective Of German Functionalism

With the rapid development of translation theories, most of the translators still conducted their research from linguistic aspect. However, the German functionalists bring the translation activities to a new threshold by combining the addressees and text functions together to optimize the translation effects. They add text typology and skopos theory into translation activities. The two theories are different from the traditional translation theories in that Skopos theory and text typology put greater emphasis on the functions of different text types.The prototype of Skopos theory is text typology which is pushed forward by Reiss. Since text typology cannot cover the whole text types, Vermeer updates the theory by breaking the limitation of the limited text types and developes it into Skopos theory. However, the development of Skopos theory still needs the support of text typology so that the definition of text types is indispensable in the process of translation.Although Skopos theory is carried out under the guidance of text functions in translation practice, the translated versions sometimes cannot be faithful to the original text. The readability of translated versions is increased, but the original content is not completely conveyed to the target readers. The applicability of Skopos theory is thus questioned. Therefore, Nord, absorbing the essence of Skopos theory and text typology, adds fidelity rule to elevate the applicability of it to realize the availability of Skopos theory. Two Chinese versions of Moment in Peking are analyzed by applying Skopos theory to literary translation in order to prove the availability of Skopos theory in literary translation domains. The analysis of different functions of text types is realized by applying different kinds of translation strategies according to various text functions to the translation of Moment in Peking. The different styles of the translated versions for the original text demonstrate the emphasis that the translators lay on the translational strategies. Besides, the different backgrounds of the translators are also taken into consideration. Hence the two Chinese versions are analyzed by the author from the perspective of Functionalism in order to realize the communication between the target readers and the translated versions in both linguistic and cultural aspects.