A Study Of English Translation Of Tang Poetry From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Chinese ancient poetry, since the appearance of The Book of Songs (《诗经》), especially Chinese Tang poetry has been paid high value by domestic and foreign sinologists, scholars and translators. Therefore, there is a wave of translating Tang poetry in or out of China, which arouses the interest and trial of many translators, and then there is the appearance of a large number of versions related to Chinese Tang poetry. However, with the comparison of these versions, it is noticeable that there is a distinct difference among various versions. In the field of translation, there is no globally accepted and unified standard to judge what is the basic standard of translating Tang poetry and which version is the best. Moreover, translators predict their translation and translation readers, so they do their utmost to show their translation styles to readers before they start translation activities. This provides the research direction and value for this thesis.This thesis mainly adopts functional theory of translation especially its kernel theory skopos theory to analyze different translators' translation activities. The main concept of this theory is "ends justify means", that is, translation skills serve for various translation purposes. Due to different translation purposes that translators want to achieve, they consciously and purposefully adopt suitable translation skills which lead to versions with particular characters far from one another.The innovative point of this thesis directs at the effort to provide the theoretical basis for comparative study on various versions of Tang poetry. What is more, there are different kinds of versions with characteristics in the area of translation emphasis, skills and styles. Then from skopos theory, before the beginning of translation, there might be a focus or emphasis in translators' thoughts, such as redisplaying rhyme skills of source texts, re-conveying the original meaning or creating new imagery. So the innovative point becomes to whether and how translators' activities are influenced by their different translation purposes. This innovation is devoted to give more reasonable theories to many recent translation activities and make the comparison of these versions more valuable. Meanwhile, skopos theory might be used in the research of poetry translation in a large scale.The beginning of this thesis starts from the translation history of Chinese Tang poetry and develops from the aspects of the introduction of skopos theory, study of translation methods from the perspective of skopos theory, and case study of English translation of Tang poetry.Chapter one offers a brief introduction of the translation history of Chinese Tang poetry, with the first part of introducing basic information of Tang poetry, and then points out the influence and status of Tang poetry translation in world academic circle.Chapter two provides the exact and detailed introduction and explanation of functional theory of translation with the view to explaining the main concept skopos theory and briefly mentioning translation skills and critical standard decided by translation purposes, meanwhile, pointing out the influence and status of this theory.Chapter three lies on study of translation methods from the perspective of skopos theory and further develops to analyze various versions of Tang poetry from three aspects- style, meaning expression and rhyme.Chapter four deepens the research on study of different versions of Tang poetry from the perspective of skopos theory. And it will give out contrastively exemplary versions translated by Ezra Pound and Xu Yuanzhong (许渊冲) respectively, in order to explain that translators' translation purposes will influence their translation skills to some extent. Thereafter, translation purposes can be regarded as the premier of guiding translation activity according to skopos theory.These themes are reviewed and summarized in the conclusion.