Translation Strategy Of Historical Biographies Under Skopos Theory

Due to China’s rising social,political and economic power,the international community,especially western countries,has become more curious about China’s attractive and mysterious history and culture.Therefore,cultural export has become one of the key missions of new phase of reform and opening up.Been valued for thousands of years,Shiji should be on the front line,showing Chinese culture to the international community.It is language learners’ task to translate this precious general history book in high quality by proper translation strategies and techniques.Biographies of four lords in the Warring State Period are a charming part of Shiji.They actively show the thoughts and emotions of ancient Chinese people,vividly describing the history and culture of pre-Qin period.Under the guidance of skopos theory,writer of the paper translated the four biographies,totally about fifteen thousand Chinese characters,aiming at delivering this period of history to vast range of native English speakers.However,some paragraphs of this kind of books are derived from ST writers’ own understanding,which are quite historical but not objective enough.This causes much difficulty for translators.Translators need to decide whether to lead TT readers to ST writer,to create a TL-environment-oriented translation to meet TL readers’ reading habit,or to search for a balance,making the translation accepted while delivering the original intention of ST writer to TT readers.Up till now,the research of translation strategy of the four lords in Shiji has been seen in small amount.Besides,current research methods are merely based on sentence analysis,which are comparatively simple and not sufficiently systematic or scientific.Therefore,writer of the paper thoroughly translated the four biographies,totally amounting approximately 15000 Chinese words.Out of the writer’s aim and potential obstacles coming in the translation process,writer of the paper utilizes the concept of cultural value and measures of qualitative and quantitative analysis to work out a more efficient way of translation,and wishes to provide other translators with a useful thinking of translating such articles.The language is simple on average in historical biographies,represented by Shiji.The type writing style demonstrates historical affairs,ancient celebrity authors’ emotion and characteristics of traditional Chinese culture.These factors are the reason why this type oftexts should be on the front line of cultural exporting.However,these texts were created much too long ago,and language is over concise,which has caused great difficulty for readers.To translate properly,appropriate techniques and strategies are required.It is found after research that the strategy of domestication should be the first choice if the translated work is to achieve a communicative aim in target language culture;the combination of domestication and foreignization should also be utilized to some extent in order to maintain the precious cultural and historical characters in the source text;and the strategy of foreignization has the strong ability of maintaining ST writer’s original intention when equivalence is achieved satisfactorily between source text and target text.