A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Animal Farm From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

In 1970 s, Hans Vermeer put forward Skopostheorie. It holds that translation is a purposeful and communicative activity, and the whole translation's process is determined by the Skopostheorie of the translation. It includes three basic rules, that is the fidelity rule, the coherence rule and the skopos rule. The fidelity rule is subordinate to the coherence rule, which is in turn subordinate to the skopos rule. The Skopostheorie takes the original author, the translator and the reader into consideration, breaking the limitations of traditional equivalence theory and providing a dynamic and multi-perspective vision for literary translation criticism. Animal Farm is an allegorical novella of dystopia by the renowned British writer George Orwell. There are at least 36 Chinese versions of the novella in China. At present, most domestic relevant studies about the translation of Animal Farm focus on the ideology of the novella, Lefevere's manipulation theory, foregrounding and the relationship between the language and power. There are few studies paying attention to the comparative study of the Chinese versions of Animal Farm from the perspective of Skopostheorie.This thesis is a research about the comparison of two Chinese versions of Animal Farm from the perspective of Skopostheorie.The two chosen renderings are Fu Weici's(???)Chinese version published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 2003 and Kui Jingqiu's(???)Chinese version published by Shanghai SDX Joint Publishing Company in 2009.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One makes a general introduction to such basic information as the background,methodology and significance of the research;Chapter Two is the literature reviews about the historical studies of Skopostheorie in literary translation and the domestic studies of Chinese translations of Animal Farm;Chapter Three mainly introduces the theoretical framework—Skopostheorie,especially the three rules;Chapter Four generally introduces the writer George Orwell and his masterpiece Animal Farm,the two translators and their renderings,elaborating on the two translators'experiences that helps to conceive their different translation styles;Chapter Five goes to the core part of the thesis,that is the comparative study of the two chosen renderings of Animal Farm.In this chapter,the author will first analyze the translation strategies and styles in terms of lexical and syntactical aspects according to the fidelity rule of Skopostheorie,and then in terms of discourse aspect according to the coherence rule,all of which leads to the analysis of the reasons for different translation strategies and styles of two renderings in terms of the translators'subjectivity and the publishing houses according to the skopos rule;Chapter Six comes to the conclusion and limitations.By conducting the comparative and descriptive research about Fu's and Kui's renderings of Animal Farm,the thesis aims to demonstrate how the Skopostheorie affects translators'strategies and styles and how the end justifies the means,so as to prove the feasibility of Skopostheorie in literary translation.