A Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Gulliver's Travels From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

As we known, Gulliver's Travels is a unique novel, written by Jonathan Swift, the famous satirical English writer and political commentator in18^th century. The author scoffs at the social wrongs and irredeemable Yahoos through what the protagonist Gulliver sees and hears during his several navigations. From the moment of its publication, it has aroused sustained critical debates. Literature critics pronounce their views on the art characteristic, potential text, and the text type of the book relatively. And sociologists state their views on problems such as the social theme, for instance, the hidden social principle and the values of the enlightenment, moral inclination, and the Utopia society. Between 1945and 1985 alone, nearly 500 books and articles devoted their attention to Gulliver's Travels. Among them, how to classify this work, which has variously been regarded as a political satire, a children's tale, a fantastic voyage, a moral allegory, and even as a novel, is still a question which has obsessed scholars.Gulliver's Travels has been translated into different Chinese versions since the early decades of twentieth-century. Some translators evolved this works into a satirical novel for the purpose of Chinese's understanding of exotic satire, while other translators tend to render it into a fairy tale for the purpose of children's experience in Swift's dramatic and bizarre imagination. Actually, all the translation versions meet their favorable comments among the given readers.Thus it is turned out that an entire equivalence between the source text and the target text is inaccessible. Otherwise, an overall consideration of the types of target text, skopos of target text and target addressees can forge a good version. And this is the very core of the Skopos theories proposed by Hans Vermeer.Hans Vermeer stated that translation is a form of purposeful behavior and translators are supposed to reproduce the source text for target addresses in a given translational situation to achieve intended communicative purposes. (Nord, 2001: 22) This theory provides a new perspective for translation, and helps scholars come out of the dilemma of free translation and literal translation.Therefore, the author studies the two different versions from the perspective of Skopos theory. According to the Skopos theories, the skopos of target text plays a decisive role in the translating process. The translation standard should be the adequacy for target text's skopos achieving, rather than the equivalence between the source text and the target text if the skopos of the target text is different from the source text's. It means that the translator is expected to adapt the source text to the intended purpose of the target text. In addition, factors that determine the skopos of translating consist of the location of the type of target text, target addressee, the intention of the source text's initiator.Two Chinese versions of Gulliver's Travels are employed in this thesis, with the first one being Zhang Jian's version in 1948 for adult readers as a political satire and another (the latest version) being Xu Chongliang and Wang Jiping's version in 2008 for juveniles (age from 12-15) as a required reading material according to the Education Department.Based on the framework of Skopos theory, this thesis intends to make a comparative study of two Chinese versions of Gulliver's Travels, with which, then, to prove that the Skopos theory can effectively direct the translator's activities. And also this thesis illustrates how to choose a suitable translation strategy when the translator is confronted with multi-directional text—ingredient of both adult literature and children literature—thereby to achieve the intended communicative purpose.