Literary Translation From The Perspective Of Functionalism

This thesis is an attempt to apply functionalism to literary translation and prove its feasibility by analyzing the two Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice. Functionalism is a broad term for various theories that approach translation by focusing on the function or functions of texts and translations and Skopostheorie has played a major role in the development of this trend. Skopos is a Greek word for "purpose" and Skopostheorie is the theory that applies the notion of Skopos to translation. There are three basic rules of Skopostheorie—Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. Many critics normally accept that functionalism works for translation of operating instructions, news texts, advertisements and the like and welcome adaptive procedures and even substitutions, paraphrases, omissions, expansions, etc. in the translation of these kinds of texts. However, literary translators or literary scholars interested in translation often doubt the applicability of functionalism to literary translation, as in literary translation the translator is usually expected to transfer not only the message of the source text but also the specific way the message is expressed in the source language. An ideal translation would then have the same function and effect as the source text. All these demands can be subsumed under the concept of "equivalence" in its widest sense. However, the thesis doubts the equivalence requirement in literary translation from the perspective of functionalism and attempts to apply the three basic rules of Skopostheorie—Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule as well as some other functionalist approaches to compare and study Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and its two Chinese versions translated by Wang Keyi and Sun Zhili in the hope of gaining a better understanding of literary translation from the perspective of functionalism.