The Application Of Skopos Theory In The Chinese Translation Of A Little Moment Of Happiness (Excerpts)

This thesis is a translation report of an English-Chinese translation for the excerpted first two chapters of A Little Moment of Happiness,which is an American novel by Clarence Budington Kelland.It features the social condition of that time,war background and vivid descriptions.Scenery description,ambiguous information and dashes are the difficult points in this translation.The translation was prepared in light of Vermeer's Skopos theory.The translator analyzed the source text and the target text at the levels of words and sentences based on the three rules of Skopos theory.For the purpose of faithfulness,the methods of division and amplification were used to translate scenery description so that the target text is accurate to the source text.The fidelity rule,according to the Skopos theory,emphasizes the inter-textual coherence between source text and target text.The translator explained the ambiguous information by literal translation with annotations and free translation to keep the beauty and the metaphor of the source text.According to the coherence rule which stresses the readability of the target text,the translator used dashes or other punctuation marks to translate dashes in order to make sure the translation can be well accepted by the target text readers.The translator also tried some other translation methods to let the text readers share the same feelings with the original ones.This report presents a specific analysis in literary translation according to the three rules of Skopos theory.The results prove that the three rules are instrumental for translating literature.Hopefully,this practice report may provide some referential experiences for English to Chinese translation of the similar kind.