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

As we know, Gulliver’s Travels is an immortal novel, which can be justly ranked among the greatest satirical works of world literature. Since the early decades of twentieth-century, Gulliver’s Travels has been translated into different Chinese versions. Some translators translated this work into a satirical novel to introduce the exotic satire to the Chinese adult readers, while other translators tend to interpret it as a fairy tale for the children to widen their knowledge about the dramatic and fantastic imagination of the writer. Actually, different versions are approved and appreciated by the target readers. It proves that all the translation versions are made to reach their specific purpose for the particular readers. It is not practical to pursue the equivalence between the source and target texts in literary translation.Translating is a purposeful activity. The Skopos may determine a translation action; which means that ’the end justifies the means’(Reiss and Vermeer,1984:101). It is the very core of the Skopos Theory which is 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). Skopos Theory says that the whole translating process depends on the purpose of target text. If the Skopos of the target text is not the same as the one of the source text, the adequacy for target text’s Skopos achieving counts more than the equivalence between the target text and the source text. The translator is expected to interpret the source text according to the intended purpose of the target text. In addition, the type of text, target addressee and the intention of the target text are the factors that determine the Skopos of translating.Two Chinese versions of Gulliver’s Travels are to be analyzed in this thesis. The first is Zhang Jian’s version in1962for adult readers as a political satire, and another one is Li Xiuxia’s version in2007for elementary students as one of New Chinese extracurricular reading material. When evaluating the two versions, the cultural background, the target readers and the intended purposes of the translation would be taken into consideration. On the one hand, this thesis aims at proving the practical and instructive significance of Skopos Theory in literary translation. On the other hand, this thesis illustrates how to choose an appropriate translation strategy about the multilevel literary text to achieve the intended communicative purpose.