Explorations Of Interpersonal Meaning In Fairy Tales’ Translation Studies

Compared with other literature genres, fairy tale, an important form of children’sliterature, does not receive enough attention from translation theorists. The reason forthat is, on the one hand, children’s literature having long been marginalized in thefield of literature; on the other hand, children’s literature being considered simple andeasy. As a matter of fact, the translation of children’s literature especially of fairy talesis of more difficulties and needs more attention resulting from their readers’ uniquefeatures and cultural difference. Lewis Carroll, as Andersen and the Brothers Grimm,is a great master of children’s literature: his masterpiece Alice’s Adventures inWonderland wins not only children but also adults’ hearts all around the world. Thebook published in1865narrates a story that a girl named Alice enters a magical landthrough a rabbit hole, after which she meets many talking creatures and human-likecards and at last, Alice finds that she experiences all those in a dream. After itspublication, the book is popular among both children and adults and has beentranslated into more than fifty languages. By now, it has hundreds kinds of versionsand adaptions.Interpersonal function is one of the three metafunctions contained in SystemicFunctional Linguistics (SFL) proposed by Halliday. Besides passing information,interpersonal function can help to express communicators’ relationships of status,attitude, intention, roles and so on in communication. In SFL, interpersonal meaningis as significant as ideational meaning and textual meaning. From the perspective ofinterpersonal function, the course of translation is the process of buildinginterpersonal meaning in target context with target reader as its subject. However,interpersonal meaning was neglected and not considered as an independent meaningcategory in traditional translation studies, which meant in translation, the “faith”being pursued equates with being faithful to the original context namely the ideationalmeaning, which didn’t take interpersonal meaning into consideration.An influential version—Wu Juntao’s translation for Alice’s Adventures inWonderland is selected in this paper. By comparing and analyzing the different methods of English and Chinese in expressing interpersonal meaning and theparticular methods of expressing interpersonal meaning taken by children’s literaturein terms of mood system and modal system, reasonable and exact method ofexpressing interpersonal meaning would be founded and applied in fairy tales’translation.