A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of Basil(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

This report is based on the novel Basil written by Wilkie Collins,a famous British novelist during the Victorian era.The novel mainly tells the tragic love story of a nobleman Basil who fell in love with a poor but beautiful lady Margaret at first sight but paid a bitter price.Collins was very renowned during his lifetime and composed a large number of works.However,for various reasons,there is no systematic research on Collins himself in China and most of his novels have not been converted into Chinese versions.Few scholars have explored his novels from the perspective of translation or even from the perspective of Skopos theory.To present the Chinese version of the novel Basil readable,the author studied the Skopos theory before translation.The essential concept of the Skopos theory is that translation strategies depend on the skopos of translation and the receptivity of target readers.The Skopos theory covers three principles:skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule.This report introduces the establishment and development process of Skopos theory,and illustrates that under the guidance of Skopos theory,such translation strategies as amplification,annotation,conversion between passive voice and active voice and adjustment of sentence order are applied into overcoming difficulties at the lexical and syntactical level so as to comply with the rules of Chinese expressions,meet target readers' needs and preserve vivid characters in Collins' works.To sum up,the Skopos theory plays a vital role in guiding the author to select proper translation techniques for the translation work.The translated version based on Skopos theory conveys information in the source text effectively and enables target readers to understand the context of the source text.Nevertheless,further study is required to figure out how the Skopos theory guides the translation of other types of popular literary works or serious literary works and whether there are other translation techniques that can be adopted to deal with the source text under the guidance of Skopos theory.