A Comparative Study Of Three Chinese Versions Of The Great Gatsby From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

Skopostheorie has stimulated an increasing interest among scholars since it was put forward in the1970s. It breaks the traditional idea of equivalence and enriches translation theories by forming a new view for the translation studies and practice. In Skopostheorie, translation is regarded as a purposeful communicative action and the whole translational action is determined by the specific translation skopos. Adequacy means that the translation should be adequate to the requirements of the translation brief and it works as the criterion of translation. Skopostheorie enables translators to flexibly choose translation strategies according to their respective purposes and effectively solve the dilemma whether faithfully copying the form of the source text or employing a flexible translation method to retain the sense of the original text. The Great Gatsby is a renowned novel created by the American writer Fitzgerald. The novel has been rendered into plenty of languages and versions. Over the past years, many studies and researches of The Great Gatsby have been conducted, mostly centering on literary aspects such as symbolism and partially evaluating one or two translations that either based on traditional translation theories or no theories at all. Thus, a systematic study of its typical translations is needed.In the thesis, three different Chinese translations are compared and analyzed from the perspective of Skopostheorie. The three selected versions are distinctive:the translations of Wu Ningkun and Yao Naiqiang are popular in the mainland, and Qiao Zhigao’s version has made a stir in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The thesis is made up of five parts. The first chapter is a brief introduction to the research background, significance and so on. The next section is literature review. Related studies on Skopostheorie and The Great Gatsby are shown. Besides, the theoretical framework of Skopostheorie is unfolded in detail. In the third chapter, the author introduces the writer Fitzgerald, his work The Great Gatsby and its three translators. The explanation of translators’ purposes set the stage for the following analyses. The main body of the thesis makes a systematical comparison of the three versions. The author discusses the adoption of different translation strategies with translators’ different purposes from the linguistic and cultural perspectives. Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule are also embedded in the contrastive analyses. The last part presents the findings, limitations of the thesis, and some suggestions for future studies in this field.The author of the thesis makes a comparison of the three different Chinese renderings of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Skopostheorie by analyzing the surface translation strategies and their deep purposes. The study finds that Qiao’s translation is produced for the skopos of culture permeation commissioned by World Today Press. To strengthen its attraction, he adopts the hybrid strategy of combining domestication and foreignization with the help of his bilingual advantage. In Wu’s translation, the styles, rhythms and American thoughts are kept by foreignization, because his skopos is to offer an opportunity to broaden the horizon of readers who are hunger for new ideas and knowledge. Hence, it is rather necessary to absorb the "exotic elements" in the translations of classic works. Yao aims to make the emerging petty bourgeoisie read fluently and his translating purpose is to warn our Chinese people of money’s negative impact. Thereafter, domestication is mainly adopted to make potential readers comprehend the target text as if they read a native Chinese novel. They are all adequate and appropriate with regard to the Skopostheorie.The thesis illustrates that Skopostheorie sheds new light on translation criticism and is able to be used in literary translation since its translation evaluation standard is pluralized. It is hoped that the findings of the research will be beneficial to further studies of Skopostheorie and the translations of The Great Gatsby.