A Study Of Translation Strategy Of Culture-loaded Words In Yang’s A Dream Of Red Mansions From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Language can help people pass information and promote their communication, as well as spread culture globally. Translation is often regarded as the bridge for the communication between different languages and cultures. There are a large number of cultural factors in literary works, especially reflected by the culture-loaded words. Culture-loaded words could carry out language and culture information under different language backgrounds. Therefore, the translation of culture-loaded words in literary works can help target language readers get a better understanding of the culture elements of source language country, and promote cultural communication between different countries.China, with five thousand years’ history and civilization, is one of the four greatest ancient countries, and its long history and splendid culture background are very famous around the world. With the translation of Chinese literature works attracting more attention from scholars around the world, how to transmit Chinese specific culture to western readers becomes an important issue in the process of translation. Culture-loaded words are encoded with the specific culture of a country or a nation, and the translation of them is one of the difficulties to transmit Chinese culture. In the process of translation, many researchers face the difficulties and challenges in translating culture-loaded words. That is to say, how to choose a proper translation strategy in different culture context to achieve the translation purpose, and how to use the proper translation strategy to make the target language readers understand different culture-loaded words are of great significance to discuss.In the 1970 s, German scholars put forth skopos theory. From the perspective of skopos theory, translation is not only a purposeful activity based on source text, but a kind of cross-culture communication activity which should be restricted by translation purpose. Therefore, translation purpose decides and influences the whole translation process, and is the highest standard of the translation process. Skopos theory includes three rules: skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. Skopos rule, as the primate rule, holds that translation purpose determines the choice of translation strategy and translation strategy should provide service to translation purpose. Coherence rule emphasizes that target text should be adequately coherent to source text so as to make the readers understand the translation content. Fidelity rule requires the inter-textual coherence between source text and target text.A Dream of Red Mansions, one of the masterpieces in China’s splendid history of classical literature, carries a large amount of Chinese traditional culture elements and culture-loaded words. This thesis will apply skopos theory as the theoretical framework and analyze the translation of culture-loaded words in Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s translation of A Dream of Red Mansions. Referring to American translation theorist Nida’s argument, the author will divide the culture-loaded words in A Dream of Red Mansions into five categories, and they are ecological culture-loaded words, material culture-loaded words, social culture-loaded words, religious culture-loaded words and linguistic culture-loaded words. And then the author will try to list the translation of some culture-loaded words in each category. Next, based on the detailed case study, the author will demonstrate how the translators choose the translation strategy to achieve their translation purpose, so as to demonstrate how the translation purpose influences the translation process. The author holds the view that a translator should take the target language readers’ understanding of Chinese culture into consideration in the process of translating culture-loaded words. Amplification, simplification, omission, substitution, literal translation, free translation, transliteration, etc. will be used for different translation purposes under the three rules of skopos theory. In this way, the target language readers could have a better understanding of the cultural information expressed in the source text and facilitate the cultural communication between different countries.