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

As an important branch of literature, children’s literature plays an important guiding role in children’s mental growth and formation of their value. As the earliest text book of human, children’s literature has a not negligible impact on broadening vision, enhancing knowledge, developing imagination, enriching emotion and so on. Children’s literature is the earliest literature that children get in touch with, so it has a profound impact on personal life.Nowadays, though children’s books occupy quite a part of all literature, they don’t get enough attention for long, staying in a peripheral position in literature. With the development of information technology and acceleration of globalization, the culture exchanges from country to country are increasingly rich. In intercultural communications, translation is very important. Since the target readers of children’s literature are children who have great differences from adults in knowledge background, comprehension ability and thinking mode, translators should choose appropriate strategies, methods and language styles accordingly so as to enable the target readers to get the similar emotional happiness and enjoyment as those of the original text.Functionalist skopos theory put forward by Hans J. Vermeer provides theoretical basis for the translation of children’s literature and it is also the theoretical foundation of this thesis. This theory, developing the traditional equivalence theory, stresses the subjective initiative and dominant role of the translators. It holds that purpose, which determines the translation strategies and skills, is dominant in translation. This theory contains three major rules: the Skopos Rule, the Coherence Rule and the Fidelity Rule. Among all the three rules, the Skopos Rule is the central one.This thesis takes classic children’s literature work Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a case study. Based on the functionalist skopos theory and characteristics of children’s literature, it evaluates the translation strategies and methods adopted in Wu Juntao’s Chinese version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from the perspective of skopos theory. The author finds that skopos theory can be applied to children’s literature translation and its criticism.