Translation Of Colour Words In Huangdi Neijing-Yellow Emperor’s Canon Of Medicine From The Perspective Of Skopostheory

The colour, humans’direct-viewing impression on nature, is everywhere on the earth. With development and enhancement of civilization, as well as language and nature intermingling with each other, colour words systerm has formed gradually. Plenty of colour words exist in ancient and morden literatures with no exception of Traditional Chinese Medicine classics. Through thousands of years of culture accumulation, the metaphorical meaning of colour words has become rich increasingly, resulting in the widely divergent meanings between ancient and modern colour words. In addition, not only the dramatical changes of colour words in both Chinese and English, but also the very different comprehension of each nation cause the difficulty in translating colour words. This kind of translation has been studied in this research from the perspective of Skopostheorie.As one of the most significant components of Functional Translation Theories, Skopostheorie advocates that translation purposes determine translation strategies, which consists of three main principles:skopos rule---communicative purpose of translation and using special methods to achieve translation purpose; coherence rule(intra-textual coherence), the readability and acceptability of translation in target language culture and communicative context; fidelity rules(intertextual rule), which means translation should be faithful to the source text.Guided by "three main principles" in Skopostheorie, translation of colour words in Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine has been invested in this research. Two hundred and seventy two colour words are calculated out and classified into six categories:single colour words, multiple colour words, degree colour words, real objects colour words, implicit colour words and non-meaning colour words. Based on translation purpose and corresponding culture and language habits in target language, the following strategies are concluded by comparing three traslation versions of Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine:metaphrase(metaphrase method and word-combination method), adaptation(replacement method, word-adding method, colour-adding method and colour-abridging method), annotation (metaphrase with annotation method and transliteration with annotation method) and paraphrase. This research aims at enhancing readability and acceptability of translation and promoting significance of translation in culture background of target language, so as to meet the communicative purpose of culture between source language and target language.