On The Translation Of Short Genre Fiction From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

This report is based on the E-C translation practice of two short genre fictions Zelda,Burning and Welcoming Death from a famous American magazine The Saturday Evening Post.The short genre fiction,shares the qualities of short fiction and genre fiction.With short length,few characters,simple but interesting plot,plain but vivid language,it is endowed with obvious commercial,entertainment and literary value.This thesis mainly discusses the translation skills used in the translation of short genre fiction from the perspective of Vermeer’s Skopos Theory.It involves five chapters.Chapter one is a brief introduction of the background,significance and structure of this translation task.Chapter two focuses on the description of the whole translation process in which the translation is divided into pre-translation,in-translation and post-translation work.Chapter three serves as the theoretical foundation,elaborating Skopos Theory’s development,its three basic rules,previous studies on it and its applicability in fiction translation.Chapter four offers a detailed and concrete analysis of the application of Skopos Theory in the translation practice of Zelda,Burning and Welcoming Death.Considering the participants of the publisher,source text,translator and target reader involved in the translation process,the translation must achieve their purposes of achieving original commercial value,literary value,entertainment function and achieving effective conveying of cultural information.On the basis of these different purposes,the corresponding translation skills are employed as follows:using an eye-catching title,adding an attractive introduction,using four-character structure,antithesis and parallelism,recreating the original expression,selecting the most vivid Chinese character,amplifying the implied meaning,converting the static expression into dynamic expression,using the colloquial language,conveying a sense of humor and using the footnotes.Chapter five summarizes the experience,limitations and suggestions of this task.In a nutshell,the features of short genre fiction and the creativity involved in literary translation lead to the applicability of Skopos Theory in the translation of short genre fiction.