A Study Of Beloved’s Translation Strategies From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

Beloved is a world-wide masterpiece of Toni Morrison. There are two Chineseversions of Beloved. The former one “Jiaonv”(娇女) was translated by WangYouxuan and published in1990. The latter one “Chonger”(宠儿) was translated byPan Yue and Lei Ge and published in1996. In the light of Skopostheorie, acomparative study is made to explore translation strategies in details of source textand two target texts. So far there are a large mount of literary studies of this work athome and abroad, but the studies of the novel from the perspective of translation arein a small number, not to mention the translation studies with Skopostheorie. Inorder to widen the translation study of Beloved, this thesis will make a detailedanalysis of the translation strategies of this novel in the perspective ofSkopostheorie..Traditional translation theories lay stress on the “linguistic equivalence”between the source text and the target text, declaring that the source text and thetarget text should be equivalent in many factors such as verbal expression, style,structure and text function. Since Skopostheorie opposite that translation is just atransfer from source language to target langue, it states that translation is across-culture communicative activity which transfers the information of the sourceculture to the target culture; it offers a new criterion or explanation for translation.Skopostheorie break up the limitation of the source-text oriented criterion andtarget-text oriented criterion, and in the framework of Skopostheorie, thetranslational criterion is purpose-oriented. Skopostheorie consists of three rules:Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. Since translation activity is determinedby Skopos, Skopos rule is the top-ranking principle in Skopostheorie which aims tosettle some questions such as free translation and faithful translation, goodinterpreters and slavish translators, dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence andso on. It tries to free translators from above eternal dilemmas. Coherence rulerequires translation should be coherent at the maximum, readable and acceptable by the target readers, and the receiver can get the meaning of the translation. Fidelityrule demands target text should keep a certain relationship with the correspondingsource text. To some extent, it is similar with maximally faithful imitation of othertranslation rules. But in fidelity rule, the degree of fidelity depends on translator’sunderstanding of target text and the purpose of every time’s translation. As far as theroles of the three rules, in the framework of Skopostheorie, fidelity rule is consideredto be subordinate to coherence role. It should be pointed that coherence rule andfidelity rule are both subordinate to Skopos rule.This thesis applies descriptive and comparative analysis methods on the basis ofSkopostheorie. There are three steps in analysis process. First, make clear oftranslation Skopos. Second, make comparisons between source text and target texts.Then, translations will be evaluated by Skopostheorie to study translation strategies.Besides, the author also applies the text analysis software Antconc to make aquantity analysis on the use of annotation by the translators of Chinese versions.From those analyses it can be found that the two Chinese versions are similar withthe original text in the aspects of language features such as black musicality, poeticlanguage and symbolism. Besides, they also apply the similar rhetorical devices insource text such as simile, metaphor, personification and exaggeration. Therefore,the source text and two target texts share some similarities in style. Then the authoranalyzes the source text and two target texts with the three key rules ofSkopostheorie, respectively, Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. Frompurpose-oriented translation analysis in black culture, the two translation versionsare translated by the same purpose of demonstrating Morrison’s strong feelings forthe black culture and her great writing features in the novel. Since translationstrategy is determined by Skopos, the two Chinese versions have similar translationstrategies. As for foreignizing translation analysis in adequacy, the two versions bothproduce an acceptable and meaningful target text for Chinese readers. For example,they both adopt some annotations to offer cultural background knowledge to bridgethe culture gap for target readers. But Pan Yue and Lei Ge’s version pays moreemphasis on culture information which conveys deep meaning of the source text. And in the level of communicative translation analysis in equivalence, both Chineseversions have achieved the effect of eliminating communicative barrier andsuccessfully transferring language and cultural information of the source text.However, Pan and Lei’s version has achieved a higher level of intertextual coherencethan Wang’s version. Under the premise of producing a meaningful and acceptabletranslation for Chinese readers, Pan and Lei focus on faithful interpretations inlanguage structure, so their version is more popular with most Chinese readers.