On The Translation Of Children’s Literature From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory--with The Chinese Translation Of The Magic Crystal As A Case Study

This thesis discusses the translation of the Australian children’s story—The Magic Crystal under the guidance of Skopos Theory with a focus on the cognitive features of children and the characteristics of children’s literature.Skopos Theory regards translation as a kind of human activity with specific purposes. It puts the purposes of translation, i.e. the skopos. in the first place. Instead of advocating establishing formal linguistic equivalence between the source text and the target text, it emphasizes that the translation methods and strategies should be determined by the intended functions of the target text in the target culture. Besides, it also focuses on the importance of target readers.The thesis first discusses the characteristics of children’s literature, analyzes and compares different translation strategics for children’s literature. Then, the focus is placed on Skopos Theory. After elaborating the development and the main ideas of Skopos Theory, the thesis applies the three rules of Skopos Theory, i.e. the Skopos Rule, the Coherence Rule and the Fidelity Rule. to the translation of The Magic Crystal with the target readers under focus with a view to creating a target text that is full of fun, easy to understand, and caters to the reading habits of Chinese children. With this case study, the thesis demonstrates that Skopos Theory can provide good theoretical guidance for the translation of children’s literature and offers a few suggestions regarding the principles and strategies for the translation of children’s literature in China.