An Application of Skopos Theory to German Literary Translation

This project translated the German short story “Ein neues Paradies” by Hans Dominik using skopos theory in order to observe how the theory interacted with the text and to critique its application to literary translation. The skopos theory states that all translation decisions are to be made with respect to the skopos, or purpose, of the target text, intentionally deprioritizing faithfulness to the source text in the translation process. The skopos of the target text of this project was to produce a modern American English translation of the source text, that provides the reader with an understanding of the source text as a representation of the cultural and historical perspective in which it was written. Upon translating the text, this project found that the theory succeeded in capturing cultural and historical elements of the story, but struggled to address literary and stylistic elements such as tone which can have complex and multiple purposes. These findings provide specific, observed examples of the stylistic and linguistic limitations of skopos theory found by Nord (1997) and limitations in literary translation by Schäffner (1998b)