Euphemism Translation In The Light Of Skopostheorie

When people use language to communicate with each other, exchange information, express their feelings, they inevitably will come across some topics or things that will bring about fear, embarrassment or other "negative associations", so they have to resort to other expressions for these topics or things—that's euphemisms. Because of difference between their special cultures, customs and so on, every society, nation has its own tabooed "sphere". Even if the same tabooed topic will be euphemized in different ways, be expressed by euphemisms with their culture items because of the cultural and language gaps between the two languages. All these pose a great challenge to translators in translating euphemisms. This interesting but challenging topic arouses many scholars' interests and they have made intensive studies on euphemism translation, and put forward insightful opinions on this issue.Euphemism is a commonly used tool for communication, however, the use of and the form of euphemism are greatly influenced by language, cultures and so on. Due to the discrepancy between languages and cultures, the translator will inevitably encounter difficulties. This thesis attempts to find a workable principle to help the translator deal with the difficulties in euphemism translation and convey the meaning of the source text euphemism to the target reader.Based on the previous research, this thesis tends to explore euphemism translation with Skopostheorie as guiding theory. As a "prospective approach" to translation study, Skopostheorie pays much attention to the target readers. So in euphemism translation, the translator has first to take the target readers' psychological need into consideration so as to decide whether the euphemistical way of expressing is necessary in target text. According to Skopostheorie, translation is a purposeful action and the purpose of translation determines the strategies adopted. This is called the "Skopos rule". Also, there are "coherence rule" and "fidelity rule" in Skopostheorie. By "coherence rule" it means that the translator should make sure that the target text should be sufficiently coherent to allow the intended users to comprehend it. or to be meaningful to target language receivers. Skopostheorie works well in guiding euphemism translation, especially in dealing with the linguistic and cultural differences between the source and target language. Under the guidance of Skopostheorie, this thesis explores euphemism translation from the points of linguistic meaning, cognition and culture. Also, this thesis touches the register equivalence in euphemism translation, and holds that the register equivalence should never be ignored in euphemism translation, so as to make the target text more reliable and readable.