Memoir Translation Based On The Skopos Theory

The Girl with No Name is a memoir which belongs to documentary literature. It describes the evolution of the growth and survival from the nature to human society during the writer’s childhood and youth. Her life experience includes three stages-being kidnaped and later raised by monkeys, leaving the forest and being peddled to brothel, becoming servant and getting married. Retaining enough facts and plots, the original book is full of meticulous and vivid psychological description, movement description as well as scene description which is pretty intriguing and deserves to be introduced to Chinese readers.German functionalist skopos describes translation as intercultural communications based on the original text. The translator can decide the communication purpose for the target text,which is combined with target readers’social cultural backgrounds and expectations for translation. The core concept of skopos is that the methods and strategies of translation are decided by the target text’s expectations or functions. Skopos includes three principles-skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule.This article firstly introduces and analyzes the original writer and text, the concerning translation difficulties and the original intention of thesis writing. Secondly, analyzing respectively the translation of words, sentences and passages of the original text, which is directed by skopos and its three principles. Among these, the part of words include word conversion and the use of Chinese four-character idioms; the part of sentences include long difficult sentence translation, passive voice translation and order adjustment; the part of passages include passage coherence and tone accordance. The writer of this essay manages to achieve the same ideas, same style and manner, along with the same ease as the original text. Moreover, the translator tries to make the translation smooth and readable, more acceptable for Chinese readers, so as to tell the splendid life story to Chinese readers by their familiar language patterns and habits. The writer of this essay has carefully summarized relevant study notes of translation by translating the original, which aims to provide other translators with good reference.