A Study Of Zhang Yousong's Translation Of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

According to Skopostheorie, translation is a purposeful activity and translation Skopos determines translation strategies, and"adequate"is the translation criterion: the translation should be adequate to the requirements of translation brief. Based on Skopostheorie, this thesis will conduct a descriptive study on Zhang Yousong's translation of Mark Twain's popular children novel—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Within the framework of this theory, the target reader is one of the most significant factors affecting the translation process. Moreover, the majority of this novel's target readers are children whose characteristics and acceptance ability are different from the adults. Therefore, the translators should make their translated versions readable and interesting for the readers. The thesis is dedicated to a descriptive analysis of Zhang's translation of this novel from the perspective of Skopos rule, intratextual coherence rule and fidelity rule. Firstly, this thesis analyzes the internal factors affecting Zhang Yousong's translation of this novel and the features of target readers, and the relative tactics he employs to achieve the communicative function of the target text. Secondly, this thesis presents a descriptive analysis of how he deals with the intratextual coherence and intertextual coherence. Thirdly, some enlightenment is drawn from the study. Finally, through the analysis, the thesis finds that: on one hand, to achieve the communicative purpose, Zhang adopts a lot of concise and lively words that children are familiar with and favor, and he also solves the cultural factors well. On the other hand, considering the reading habit of the target readers, Zhang exerts himself to flexibly deal with the sentence structures and the expressions of words to obtain better intratextual coherence. Dealing with intertextual coherence, Mr. Zhang employs the colloquial languages and transmits the humorous effect, which reproduces the spirit of the original to a large extent. The enlightenment drawn from this study is: when translating for children, the translators should do their work from the viewpoint of children and meet the various needs of them, and then adopt domestication as the primary strategy and foreignization as the supplementary strategy. At the same time they should reproduce the original spirit to a large extent to retain the literariness of novels. With an overview of Zhang's translation, although there are some minor disadvantages, Zhang has realized the intended purpose of the target text: that is to bring enjoyment to the readers and to reproduce the spirit of the source text. It is an adequate translation on the whole. The study of literary translation from Skopostheorie can offer a new perspective to testify if the translation has achieved the intended function, which also has some enlightenment for future translation practice.