On The Skopos Of Translation Activities Of China's Western Regions

China's Western Regions, the old name of Xinjiang, has been a multinational area where manifold languages, religions and cultures coexist since the ancient times. People of all nationalities in the regions closely communicate with each other on the basis of equality and mutual benefit in politics, economy and culture for thousands of years. In the far-ranging contact and communication, translation, as a bridge and bond, has played a very positive and important part. Therefore, the study of translation activities and purposes of China's Western Regions can contribute to the research of the history of race relationship, language relationship and culture, and especially the research of the translation practice and theory.However, as far as the author is able to judge, no one abroad has studied translation activities of China's Western Regions. In China, it was not until late in the twentieth century that the project group presided by Rezhake Maitiniyazi(热扎克·买提尼牙孜) investigated them systematically from the angle of history and translatology. Based on their study, the thesis tries to probe into them from the new perspective of Skopostheorie.Skopostheorie, the core of German Functionalism, which considers translation as a purposeful activity. In Skopostheorie by Hans J. Vermeer, there are three very important rules, namely, skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule, and the skopos rule is the top-ranking one. According to Skopostheorie, "the end justifies the means" (qtd. in Nord 2001:29), that is, the intended communicative purpose determines the translation strategies the translator adopts. The three possible kinds of purpose in the field of translation distinguished by Vermeer include "the general purpose aimed at by the translator in the translation process, the communicative purpose aimed at by the target text in the target situation and the purpose aimed at by a particular translation strategy or procedure"(Nord 2001: 27-28).In this thesis, the author begins the discussion with a brief introduction to the study of translation activities of the Western Regions, after that, outlines Skopostheorie studies in China, then comes to the climax of the exploration of five aspects of translation activities and purposes of China's Western Regions, namely, government affairs translation, religion translation, literature translation, musical art translation and press translation, accompanying by the respective analysis of them from the angle of Skopostheorie.According to the author's findings, the government affairs translation at least includes three aspects: translation concerning military action, translation concerning the envoy's come-and-go and translation concerning the political management of the Central Plains over China's Western Regions. They are respectively analyzed from the angle of hierarchical purposes of translation. In religion translation, the thesis mainly deals with sutra translation. Different translation strategies were adopted in order to accomplish the intended purpose. At the same time, from the communicative purpose, the translation purpose of religion translation is to satisfy the spiritual need of society and to serve the feudal rulers. In the literature translation, adaptation is usually adopted to serve different translation purposes. In addition, the choice of the source text is not accidental. Music is one of vehicles of cultures. Although the records concerning the musical translation of China's Western Regions are very rare, judging from the few data and cultural commonness, it can be concluded that musical translation is also very purposeful. Press translation in China's Western Regions refers to the translation of Ili Baihua Paper. Editing is mainly adopted in the text-processing for the sake of intra-textual coherence. The influence of ideology on the translation of Ili Baihua Paper is to make the translation enlighten people and propagandize revolution.The research result shows that Skopostheorie can be used to well explain translation activities of China's Western Regions, and government affairs translation, religion translation, literature translation, musical art translation and press translation are very purposeful. In Skopostheorie, the fidelity rule is subordinate to the coherence rule and both of them are subject to the skopos rule, which has violated the traditional standards of "equivalence" or "faithfulness". Therefore, it has opened up a wholly new and dynamic perspective to translation studies. It is clear that Skopostheorie has widened the research range of translation theory and it is very powerful in explaining lots of translation phenomena.