Functionalist Perspective Fu Donghua Translation Of "gone With The Wind" Study

Fu Donghua (1893—1971), a famous contemporary translator in China, is the first translator who introduced Gone with the Wind, a best seller prevailed in America to the Chinese readers. For a long time, most comments have mainly been on his "unfaithfulness". The critics mostly argue that there are too much domestication and deletion in his translation. Most comments on his translation are made from a static, unilateral perspective. They lack the guide of a systematic, scientific and theoretical frame considering texttypen, translation purpose, specific social-cultural background of China and requirement of the Chinese readers. Nowadays, most German functionalist scholars believe that different types of text call for different approaches to translation. Translation process is determined by the skopos prescribed by the initiator. Translator is responsible to all the agents in the translation interaction, not only to the target reader, the initiator, but also to the source text producer. This theory makes an objective and scientific evaluation on translational text. Based on the functionalist theory, especially typology, Skopostheorie, and the rule of function plus loyalty, with special reference to relevant theories of hermeneutics and influence study, this thesis intends to investigate Fu's Chinese translation of the Gone with the Wind, and his major translational strategy adopted in the course of translating. The main focus is on the strategy of domestication which has been chosen in the target text, and its aesthetic effect upon the target readers; as is the function of the functional approach to the study of a particular translated literary work.