A Report On The Translation Of The Cosmetic Gaze (Excerpts) Under The Guidance Of Skopos Theory

The translation of academic texts can help us absorb and learn from the excellent achievements of foreign cultures,which will undoubtedly play a great role in the development of a civilization.The report is based on the translation of the first chapter of the academic work The Cosmetic Gaze.Via cultural archaeology,it presents the deep logic about people’s body modification and beauty construction and delineates a new area of feminism,which can be served as an important guiding role for the research of body and media.With regards to the first chapter,it is found that its language style of is formal and logical.Moreover,abundant terminologies as well as long and complex sentences are frequently used.Based on these linguistic features,the reporter chooses skopos theory as his guiding theory.Skopos theory takes the purpose of translation as the center,giving more freedom to the reporter who can choose translation strategies and methods more flexibly to achieve his translation purpose.Thus,it is necessary to combine skopos theory with the translation of academic works.The translation report aims to analyze specific cases in the translation process under the guidance of three rules of skopos theory,exploring how to achieve faithfulness in translating academic works.Skopos rule is the top-ranking rule for any translation,which says that a translational action is determined by its skopos.The reporter adopts the strategy of literal translation when the sentence structure is similar to that of Chinese.However,when literal translation is not accessible,the strategy of deviation can be adopted.Coherence rule is the second important rule for skopos theory,aiming to consider reading habits of the target readers.With this rule,the reporter takes attributive clauses,passive voices and long and complex sentences as examples to explain.Fidelity rule serves as the last rule for skopos theory,which can be explained as faithfulness to the source text.This rule can be adopted for lexical level.It will be illustrated from the translation of context-dependent words,context-free words and nouns.In a word,the reporter finds that no matter what translation strategies or methods are adopted,"faithfulness" seems to be the primary principle for the academic translation.