A Study Of Strategies Used In The E-C Translation Of Children's Picture-books—a Functionalist Skopos Theory Approach

Picture-books are one of the particular genres in children's literature.The uniqueness of picture-books is based on the combination of two levels of communication,the visual and the verbal.Picture-books play an important role in children's early reading because of the simple and entertaining language,content-rich illustrations,concise stories,and the educational significance.Publication of children's picture-books develop rapidly in China in 2000.According to incomplete statistics,the imported foreign children's picture-books account almost 80% of the market share in 2017.In the long term,the translated foreign picture-books will take up a large proportion in China's children's picture-book market.The introductions of excellent foreign picture-books and the translations in accordance with children's psycho-linguistic characteristics will certainly promote children to be fond of picture-books and help them cultivate their early reading habits.With such a large picture-book translation market;however,the translation varies in quality significantly.It is often found in some translations that the used language is too formal,boring,difficult for children to understand;they fail to consider the influences of interplay between verbal and visual;the over domestication strategy is applied in the cross-cultural communication.It's concluded that picture-book translation is not paid due attention to by linguists and translators.Furthermore,some translators are not skilled enough with professional children's language development theory and translation theory.In this thesis,I apply the German Skopos Theory as a guideline to analyze the translation strategies from three aspects: verbal text translation,the function of verbal and visual interplay and cross-cultural communication.The author takes the three rules as guideline to analyze the E-C translation of children's picture-book.First,in the analyzed verbal picture-book translation,it's concluded that the skopos rule enables the translator to select flexible translation strategies to accomplish his/her translation purpose.It's an ideal way to combine literal translation and free translation in translation practice.Next,the coherence rule provides the translator with evidence to realize the intra-textual coherence.It's so important for children to learn Chinese via picture-books that thetranslator must pay sufficient attention to the differences between Chinese and English.Providing a cohesive and smooth text will definitely facilitate children to learn proper Chinese.Finally,the fidelity rule supports the translator to realize inter-textual relationships by analyzing the translation strategies from three aspects: text type,verbal and visual interplay,cross-cultural communication.Pictures can't be ignored because they are very helpful for the translator to overcome the language ambiguity and make accurate translation.Since picture-books belong to audio-media text type,the translator must take a full account of the function of verbal and visual interplay in storytelling and ensure both linguistic and the non-linguistic media and achieve the same communicative function as the original picture-books.The picture-book translation is also defined as a translation process of dealing with cross-cultural communication barriers.Therefore,it's suggested that the foreignization translation strategy should be adopted so as to expand the horizons of children through reading excellent picture-books.