Metaphor Translation From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the continuous amplification of economic globalization and the gradually deepening cultural exchanges between countries, a lot of American dramas swarm into the Chinese market and enjoy great popularity among the Chinese learners. Desperate Housewives is one of them, whose subject matter is lives of several housewives. In order to satisfy the great needs of the audience, it is broadcasting Season8, which shows the high degree of concern from the public. Consequently, the subtitle translation becomes more and more important, without which the audience can’t comprehend the whole plots of drama easily. Therefore the subtitle translation plays an important role in revealing the personality characteristics of characters more vividly in order to help the audience better appreciate the drama.Under the background of frequent cultural communication, many traditional translation theories mainly concentrated on the linguistic aspect and they can’t meet the needs of complicated translation practice, especially the dramas like Desperate Housewives, since people just consider the target audience’s acceptance as the most important factor in the process of translation. But the appearance of German Functionalist Translation Theory in the1970s opened up a whole new perspective for translation action with the Skopos Theory as its core and Skopos Rule, Coherence Rule and Fidelity Rule as its three main principles. And Vermeer advocates that the Skopos Rule is the supreme principle of translation and regards the subtitle translation as a purposeful act, that is to help the target audience to understand and absorb the exotic culture, and what’s more, to achieve the purpose of cultural communication.This thesis takes the metaphor translation in the Desperate Housewives as study object and the author tries to explore the suitable translation strategies under the guidance of the principles of the Skopos Theory. First of all the author classifies metaphors in the drama into two kinds:metaphors in speech and action and metaphors in description. By making a detailed analysis of examples under the guidance of three rules of Skopos Theory, the author tries to offer some proper translation strategies. For the first kind, domestication is suggested, which is easy for the Chinese audience to appreciate the drama; for the second, the translators have to adopt flexible translation strategies including literal translation, domestication, substitution, transference between metaphor and simile, and sometimes annotation is also necessary on the basis of various purposes. At last the author summarizes the whole thesis. In the process of translation, the translator should take the target audience’s expectation into account and adopt flexible strategies so that can help them to fulfill the purpose of better appreciation in the meanwhile cross-culture communication.