Reader’s Absence In Translating Children’s Literature

Children’s literature plays a very important role in the process of growth. It not only enriches children’s mental world, provides them with knowledge, but also is extremely essential to the formation of their early opinions about world and value. Nowadays, outstanding literary works keep flowing into China. But for children, who have limited receptivity and language ability, good translations are far from enough. Translations of children’s literature are uneven between theoretically and practically, and this has caught many problems. On one hand, there are a great many translations, on the other hand, specialized research about this kind of translation have been so few that translation of children’s literature has always at the edge of translation research. However, the success of the Chinese version of Harry Potter series has brought China the long-lost upsurge of children’s literature. Translators focus their attention on the quality of translated children’s literature again, for example, Liu Luolin analyzes detailed translation skills used in the translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in his essay. Translators want to have translated ones as good as Harry Potter series in the future.During the process of children’s literature translating, one of the biggest obstacles is that translators cannot test and evaluate his/her work in the way how children think. This is about readers’absence in translation. Translators should fully understand the functions of children’s literature and children’s horizon of expectations to overcome it. The core of Skopostheorie is the skoposrule, which indicates that it is the most important purpose of translation to produce a transition that can achieve its intended functions. Translators of children’s literature should follow the rule of Skopostheorie, and the translations should attain the goal of attracting children and inspiring them. Moreover, translators also should understand the horizon of expectations of children readers. Horizon of expectations is the expectations of readers for the works before they actually read and during the reading process, based on complicated conditions, both personally and socially. And it is the core concept of Reception Theory. Correct understanding of children reader’s receptivity, aesthetic judgment and values can help translators with the best translations.After the introduction to general situation of children’s literature, the status quo of its translation and the research about Skopostheorie and Reception Theory, this thesis mainly discusses about the applications of Skopostheorie and Reception Theory in the process of children’s literature translating with the analysis of the Chinese version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Su,2000) and the original work, Through the detailed analysis of some examples, it is concluded that in the process of children’s literature translating, translators should adopt flexible translating strategies under the guideline of Skopostheorie and the full understanding about children’s horizon of expectations, for the successful translation.