On Translation Of Culture-Loaded Words In Lin Yutang's Six Chapters Of A Floating Life: From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Translation is a kind of human activity as well as a purposeful action, so its purpose (skopos) determines and justifies the entire process of translation. Whether a target text is a good translation is judged by the degree of "adequacy" it achieved to fulfill the translation purpose. This is the fundamental idea of skopos theory. Being a major breakthrough in the traditional translation theory of "equivalence" and an important supplementary approach to the translation research, the skopos theory blazed a new path for translation study and practice.In the C-E translation, the key point is how to deal with the utterly different cultural factors of two languages; therefore, the translation of culture-loaded words is always the main concern of translators and researchers.Based on the skopos theory, this paper is aimed at conducting a deep and objective analysis of the translation of culture-loaded words in Lin Yutang's translation work of Six Chapters of a Floating Life. As a trial translation study with the help of skopos theory, this paper first gives a relatively comprehensive elucidation about skopos theory and then makes a descriptive analysis on the translation purpose of Lin Yutang as well as the translation strategies and methods of the culture-loaded words decided by this purpose. After that, this paper makes a systematic classification and a statistics study on the culture-loaded words and their translations in Six Chapters of a Floating Life. Finally, it comes to a conclusion that Lin's translation purpose has decided his choice and application of translation strategies and methods, which has, in return, accomplished the task of transferring the Chinese culture to western readers and adequately fulfilled the translation purpose. This research has also provided the evidence that skopos theory can be applied as a means to deal with the phenomena and issues in translation practice. This paper is of a referential value for translation study of Lin Yutang and of a guiding significance for the translation study and practice.