On Children’s Literature Translation From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

As a branch of literature, children’s literature has not only the characteristics that all kinds of literature have, but also its own individuality, which plays an important role in children’s physical and mental growth and the formation of their outlook on life and world. With the development of children’s literature, its translation activity has become increasingly important. Accordingly, it draws attention from many scholars at home and abroad, who start trying to make considerable studies on the translation of children’s literature from different theoretical perspectives. In China, children’s literature stemmed from the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty. Since then a lot of renowned scholars and translators devoted themselves in children’s literature translation, especially fairy tale translation and attempted to research on fairy tale translation, which has exerted a profound influence on the development of children’s literature in China. Recently great importance has been attached to children’s literature translation by many scholars and translators, and some related theories have also been proposed. However, the study of children’s literature translation till now is far from adequate and many problems arising in the translation practice still need to be explored.Based on the skopos theory, this thesis, while addressing the practical issues in the translation of children’s literature, mainly studies the principles that should be obeyed and strategies adopted by translators in the course of translating children’s literature. The thesis has adopted the method of case study, using two translated versions of The Wind in the Willows as examples. The thesis tries to illustrate how the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule guide and influence the translators’translation procedure through the comparison of the two translated versions from the linguistic level, rhetorical level and cultural level. Then the author draws a conclusion that due to different translating purposes, the two translators have adopted different translation strategies and methods, thus producing two translated versions with different characteristics in language style.