The Chinese Version Of The Chronicle’s Of Narnia: A Translation-Oriented Text Analysis

Christiane, Nord, as the leading figure of the second generation of Germanfunctionalist approach, made German functionalism more applicable and universal byseeking the improvement of the first generation of German functionalist approach andadding more practical elements to Skopostheorie. She presents the looping model ofthe translation process and applies it to translation study of various text types in herworks Text Analysis in Translation: a Model for Translation-Oriented Text Analysis.This “top to down” model takes the intra and extra textual factors into account in allaspects, providing a realistic direction and theoretical foundation for the translator todetermine the translation type, translation style, and discover the translation principleand corresponding translation problems.This thesis mainly introduces the translation-oriented text analysis proposed byNord, including her translation typologies and a looping model for the translationprocess. Special attention is given to the instructiveness, universality and practicalapplicability of the translation process. This paper chooses The Chronicles of Narnia(mainly book I, book III, book IV and book VI), one of the “fantasy fanatic” genres asthe research data, and makes a trial to go for the text analysis in translation followingthe steps of the translation process interpreted by Nord: step one is to go for a detailedanalysis of the source text; step two is to draw a tentative conclusion of the translationtype, style, principle and its probable problems by making a comparison of theinterpretation on intratextual and extratextual factors; step three is to testify thecorrectness of the translation principle and to check the actual translation on thoseprobable problems in The Chronicles of Narnia. On the basis of the looping model,this paper tries to present the translation principle which is able to act as the guidanceand the translation problems in the process of translating, and then further explains how the translation principle directs the child-directed translation style by examiningthe duplicative phrases, four-character idioms and interjections in The Chronicles ofNarnia. Meanwhile, cultural distance, wordplays, invented words are proved to be thetranslation problems with examples in the The Chronicles of Narnia. It is far fromachieving the cultural equivalence and the functional equivalence since the translatormainly adopts omissions, deletions and footnotes to cope with them.In the end, the author tentatively reaches the following conclusions: Nord’smodel of translation-oriented text analysis could serve as guidance for the translationprocess of children fantasy genre and could help to determine the translation type,style, principle, along with discoveries of possible translation problems by the STanalysis. It has a great significance for assessing the quality of present translation,selecting the translation strategies, and improving the quality of future translationversions.