Research On The English Translation Of Ink-and-Wash Picture Books Of Classic Chinese Stories From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

In recent years,children’s picture books have been popular among children readers due to their exquisite design,interesting plot and straightaway language.In order to strengthen cultural communication between different countries and satisfy reading needs of foreign and domestic children readers,more and more children’s picture books are produced and translated into different languages.However,the translation of children’s picture books is quite limited due to the lack of guidance from an appropriate translation theory.Skopos Theory,belonging to functional translation theories,emphasizes that translation is a human action with a purpose and translating methods can be determined by the purpose of translation.Accordingly,Skopos Theory can be used to guide the translation of children’s picture books for considering that children are main readers of picture books and the translation purpose is mainly to satisfy the needs of children readers.This research takes Chinese indigenous children’s picture books as the example,and makes an exhaustive analysis of their translated versions under the guidance of Skopos Theory.Different from other literary genres,children’s picture books are characterized by multimodality,which depict stories in the interplay of words and illustrations.Therefore,the translator should also pay attention to the illustration information of the source text in the translation process.Ink-and-Wash Picture Books of Classic Chinese Stories(hereafter abbreviated as Ink-and-Wash Picture Books)are Chinese indigenous bilingual picture books,which introduce readers many Chinese classic traditional cultural stories and are loved by children readers due to the delicate design and excellent interplay of words and illustrations.There are eight volumes in this series,and this thesis mainly takes the first six volumes as the research object,which are rendered by the same translator,Liu Yi,a senior editor in China Today.This study adopts literature research method,interview method and case analysis to explore the translation purpose of the target text from the perspective of readers’ needs,translator’s aims and publisher’s demands,then makes a further analysis of translation of Ink-and-Wash Picture Books under the guidance of the skopos rule,the coherence rule and the fidelity rule.There are three proposed research questions:(1)What is the translation purpose of Ink-and-Wash Picture Books?(2)Whether the translated text of Ink-and-Wash Picture Books is in accordance with the three rules of Skopos Theory?(3)Whether the illustrations of Ink-and-Wash Picture Books play a role in translation?Through the analysis,the conclusions are as follows:(1)The thesis explores the translation purpose of Ink-and-Wash Picture Books from the perspective of readers’ needs,translator’s aims and publisher’s demands.Based on the cognitive characteristics of children readers,translation aims proposed by the translator during the interview and publisher’s demands,the translation purpose of Ink-and-Wash Picture Books is to convey source text information by using readable and acceptable language for children readers,to produce a translated text that is coherent and faithful to the source text,and to spread Chinese traditional culture to the west.(2)The translation purpose of Ink-and Wash Picture Books is effectively accomplished under the guidance of Skopos Theory.In order to meet the cognitive needs of children,the translated text retains the rhyme and rhythm of the source text,makes the translated text catchy and achieves the same reading effect as the source text.In terms of the use of rhetorical devices,the translator retains and even increases the use of rhetorical devices during translation,which further arouses children’s interests in reading.In addition,the translator takes the differences in syntactic structures and thinking modes between Chinese and English into account,and makes certain adjustments so as to clarify information of the source text,reduce the cognitive burden of children and achieve the intra-textual coherence.Finally,Skopos Theory requires that the translated text should be in accordance with both the textual information and the illustration information of the source text in the translation process,because the illustrations of the source text can provide a certain reference for translator’s choice of words.(3)In the translation of children’s picture books,what the translator should do is to satisfy the reading needs of target children readers.According to the cognitive characteristics of children readers,to some extent,children are more easily attracted by the illustrations when they read picture books.In fact,the relationship between text and illustrations contributes to achieving the translation purpose.Therefore,the translator can enrich the implicit information of the source text by means of consulting the illustration information of picture books,to better achieve the intra-textual coherence of the target text.Besides,the coherence between words and illustrations also can be achieved.In the translation of Ink-and-Wash Picture Books,the translator tends to take the illustration information into account so as to choose the appropriate diction in the translated text.The translation research of children’s picture books remains to be conducted in depth,and there is no systematic translation theory to guide their translation.Consequently,this study takes the multimodal characteristics of children’s picture book into account,and attempts to adopt Skopos Theory to guide the translation of children’s picture books,hoping to provide some references for the translation research of children’s picture books.