On Translation Of Children’s Literature From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

In the field of translation studies, the study on the translation of children’s literature is marginalized and has not aroused proper attention. So focusing on the cognitive features of children and the characteristics of children’s literature, this thesis adopts the case study method and the contrastive study method to discuss the chilidren’s literature translation from the perspective of the skopos theory in the hope of offering useful suggestions for the translation of children’s literature in China.Skopos theory, the basic theory of the thesis, regards translation as a kind of human activity with specific purposes. It puts the purpose of translation in the first place.Instead of the blind pursuit of formal linguistic equivalence between the source text and the target text, it emphasizes that the translation methods and strategies should be determined by the intended functions of the target text.This thesis chooses two commonly accepted Chinese versions of The Wind in the Willows by Ren Rongrong and Yang Jingyuan for a case study. It attempts to reflect the different choices depending on the different translation purposes in translation process of the two famous translators through contrastive analyses of their translation strategies and actual function in their versions from the perspective of skopos theory. The thesis includes four chapters. The first chapter is the overall introduction of the thesis. The second chapter discuss the children’s literature and the skopos theory respectively. The third chapter is the main body of the thesis. This chapter points out the different translation skopos of Ren Rongrong and Yang Jingyuan and analyzes their Chinese versions with the comparison of 21 examples under the guide of the three basic rules--the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule of skopos theory. The contrastive studies show that Ren’s successful recreations of the pure fun for Chinese children and the closeness of his translation to children’s preference reflects his emphasis on the dependence of the text function on children and their reception. On the other hand, Yang’s maintenance of references and stylistic features of the source text, as well as the wide use of the phonetic notations and reduplicated words reflects that she emphasizes both of the recreational function and the educational function of the children’s literature.The last part is a conclusion which gives the summary of the whole paper and clarifies the research results and the limitation.