On Children’s Literature Translation From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

As an important branch of the literary system, children’s literature plays a significant role in children’s lives and offers a fantastic world for children where they can get pleasure. As we all know, there is no national boundary in literature, and it is hoped that excellent literary works could be spread to the whole world through translating. Therefore, children’s literature translation has been carried out.Many people regard that children’s literature translation is much easier and simpler than other types of literature translation. Actually, children’s literature translation is as difficult as, or even more difficult than that of adults’. Besides the general characteristics that all kinds of literature have, children’s literature also has its unique features. As target readers of children’s literature, children who are different from those adult have disparate language ability and reading requirements. Therefore, children’s literature is different from adults’in many aspects, such as the theme, structure of the story and the language style, etc. Translators must keep those elements in mind during the process of translating.In recent years, many scholars at home and abroad have made extensive study on children’s literature translation based on many different translation theories, and have attained a lot of significant findings. Nevertheless, compared to the study of other types of literature translation, the study of children’s literature translation are far from being enough.The author of this thesis attempts to discuss children’s literature translation from the perspective of the Skopos theory. It aims at exploring the significance of applying the Skopos theory to the translation of children’s literature by comparing two Chinese versions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Through the comparison, the author tries to illustrate that children’s literature translation could, and should be guided by the Skopos theory.As to the design of this thesis, it is composed of five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to the thesis, generally displaying the background, the purpose and significance of the study and the research methodology.Chapter Two is the literature review, which is presented in three parts. In the first part, the author briefly introduces two important concepts, children and children’s literature. Children’s literature is discussed from the aspects of its definition and features. In the second part, a historical review of children’s literature translation in China is discussed. The history is divided into three stages:the "May Fourth" period, the period from the1950s to the1970s, and the period from the1980s to the present time. The last part of this chapter deals with the current situation of children’s literature translation and analyses some probable problems.A theoretical framework is then presented in Chapter Three, including a brief introduction to Skopos theory, and the three main rules. The brief introduction consists of its development and translation belief. After that, the Skopos rule, the Coherence rule, and the Fidelity rule are explained respectively.Chapter Four is the most important part of this thesis. The first part of this chapter analyzes the application of Skopos theory to children’s literature translation. And next is the case study of two Chinese versions of children’s literary work--Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The author introduces the literary work Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its two Chinese versions which is designed to serve as the material for further comparative study, and then analyzes the two versions based on the three rules. According to the comparative study, the author points out which version is better and proves that Skopos theory is a proper and efficient theory to guide children’s literature translation. Chapter Five is the conclusion of this thesis. The main findings are generally summarized in this part. Furthermore, it points out limitations of the study and displays corresponding suggestions for further research of children’s literature translation.