The Chinese Translation Of English Dialects From The Perspective Of German Functional Approaches

Dialect translation has always been a difficult point in translating English literature into Chinese. There is no unified strategy in translating English dialects into Chinese. This paper discusses the translation of English dialects through studies on two Chinese versions of Tess of the d’Urbervilles under the framework of German functional translation approaches, in the hope of making some contributions to the future studies of dialect translation.Tess of the d’Urbervilles is one of the classic works of Thomas Hardy, the famous master in literature. Hardy successfully portrays some vivid characters in this book, reflecting characters’ birth, education and social status by using English dialects. He integrates language and culture perfectly into the development of the story, which makes it the masterpiece in literature, but also brings unprecedented challenges to translators.German functional translation approaches get rid of restrictions of equivalent translation theory, extending translation to translation action. As the starting point, source text is the sole criterion to enhance whether the target text is good or not according to traditional translation theories. However, in the view of German functional translators, Skopos and loyalty rule of translation are the chief standard. Translation is a purposeful action. Whether a version is loyal to or to what extent is the version loyal to its source text is determined by the purpose of translation.This paper applies German functional approaches into dialect translation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by case study on two famous versions from Zhang Guruo and Sun Zhili. Through the analysis of agent roles and translation briefs and Skopos of these two Chinese versions, we can see that though they choose different dialect translation strategies, their versions are both masterpieces. Dialect for dialect translation strategy adopted by Zhang Guruo and colloquialism translation strategy used by Sun Zhili are both feasible dialect translation strategies, but they are not yet perfect. This paper only further put forward some suggestions on dialect translation, attempting to make some contributes to future research.