A Report On The Chinese Translation Of Weapons Of Happiness

The selected text of this report is the drama Weapons of Happiness written by the famous British dramatist Howard Brenton,with a total of 15,902 English words.Weapon of Happiness was published in 1976,and there is no Chinese version yet.The play tells the story of workers in a small factory in south London who rebel against their irksome owners,and conveys a deep humanistic concern about the themes of the play.Brenton’s plays are characterized by obvious violence,as well as rhetorical devices such as banter and irony.There are many modal words and strong colloquial language,some characters’ dialogues and plots are illogical,and the meaning is ambiguous.These characteristics add some difficulties to the translation of the play.The focus and core of Skopos Theory is the skopos rule,which is the main rule to measure translation activities.We should also follow the rules of coherence and fidelity.These rules have a strong guiding significance for realizing the meaning conversion of dramatic works.Therefore,in view of the above translation difficulties,the translator chooses Skopos Theory as the guiding theory to translate Weapon of Happiness and writes a practice report.Guided by the three rules of Skopos Theory,the report adopts the methods of adjusting word order,amplification,liberal translation,omission,sentence recombination,voice transformation,culture localization,explanatory translation and repetition to explore the strategies and methods of combining Skopos Theory with the translation of Weapon of Happiness.This practice report shows that under the guidance of Skopos Theory,translators can consider adopting more effective translation strategies to achieve the purpose and function of text.For example,modal word translation in the drama should be combined with the context and adopt the translation strategy of cultural localization.For illogical dialogue in a play,the translation strategy of amplification or sentence recombination can be adopted.Skopos Theory takes into account the multiple relationships among translator,original author and target language reader,provides a more comprehensive perspective for drama translation practice,and can effectively guide drama translation and improve the quality of translation.