On The English-chinese Translation Of Romantic Fictions From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

As domestic translation undertakings and translator teams keep growing, large scale of foreign excellent and best selling literary works have been translating into Chinese. Romantic fiction, a type of popular literature, naturally accounts for a large proportion among the translated works. However, in the translation study of foreign literary work translation, few scholars have carried out specialized studies in the translation of romantic fictions. Therefore, there’s still large space for further promoting the study of translating romantic fictions.This thesis chooses the Irish writer Maeve Binchy’s novella The Builders as translation material and the functionalist translation theory—skopostheorie as theoretical guidance. By analyzing the translation practice of this translation texe, it aims at proposing some feasible translation techniques for the translation of romantic fictions, as well as exploring the basic mode of translation such type of novels. After the combined analysis on Skopostheorie and the translation skopos of this translation project, the writer has concluded two key points of translating romantic fictions: Firstly, the translated texts should faithfully convey the unique features of the original. Secondly, the translated texts should follow the Chinese habit of expression. Meanwhile, the writer also analyzes the existing Chinese versions of Meave Binchy’s works, picking out and analyzing the deficiencies in those works and offering suggestions to improve the deficiencies and thus to provide guidance and reference for the practice of translating The Builders. While translating, the writer follows the three basic rules of skopostheorie, i.e. the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule, and adopts different translation techniques to deal with the typical examples which embody the two key translation points in the original text. Those techniques include transliteration plus annotation, splitting plus reorganization, amplification, substitution, reconstructing, etc.By analyzing the whole translation process, it can be summarized that skopostheorie can play a guiding role in the translation of this romantic fiction, and that while translating a romantic fiction, the translator should firstly achieve faithfulness to the unique features of the original text, and secondly make sure the translated text is in accordance with the expression habit of Chinese. The writer hopes that the analysis of this translation practice can offer some useful references for the translation of romantic fictions and looks forward to more excellent translations of foreign romantic fictions coming into being.