A Comparative Study On C-E Translation Of Allusions In San Guo Yan Yi From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

San Guo Yan Yi is one of the Four Chinese Classical Masterpieces and it presents us avast and vivid picture of social and historical life. The novel abounds with rich allusionswhich reflect the knowledge of history, military, literature, myth and legend in ancientChina. The allusions all contain profound national color and embody the profound culturalfoundation and connotations of Chinese nation. However, the unique cultural connotationsof allusions become a barrier of translating allusions because the source text author andtarget text readers live in different cultural contexts and the two sides find it difficult toshare the common history and cultural background. So how to bridge the gap of culturaldifferences and effectively transmit the cultural connotations of source text allusions totarget text readers so as to achieve cultural communication and integration is the mainfunction or task of C-E translation of allusions.German functionalist theories which appeared in1970s have blazed a new perspectivefor studying translation under the cross-cultural background. The key theory of Germanfunctionalism: Skopostheorie, plays an important role in guiding translation practice. Itholds that translation is a purposeful cross-cultural human communicative action and thetop-ranking rule for any translation is Skopos rule. The anticipated purpose of translatedtext is the most important standard for the translator to choose the suitable translationstrategies and methods. Different purposes will lead to different translated texts andtranslation forms of the same source text. Meanwhile, translation purposes are affected byvarious factors such as translation brief, communicative situations, translator, initiator andtarget text readers and so on.The author of this thesis adopts the quantitative and qualitative research approaches to systematically analyze the two English versions of San Guo Yan Yi under the guidance ofSkopostheorie. By creating the parallel corpus of original Chinese text of San Guo Yan Yiand two English full-length versions (one translated by Moss Roberts and the other by C.H.Brewitt-Taylor), the author selected97allusions from San Guo Yan Yi and its two Englishversions and made a detailed comparative analysis. The research result shows the C-Etranslation of allusion is a purposeful cross-cultural human communicative action and aprocess of faithful recreation of Chinese culture to target culture under the guidance ofSkopostheorie. When translating the allusions, Roberts mainly employed the strategy offoreignization and his purpose was to transmit Chinese traditional culture to targetlanguage readers. Since the anticipated readers were the modern western readers who knewsomething about China and expected to further study Chinese culture, Roberts mainlyadopted the methods of literal translation and literal translation with notes which followedthe rule of fidelity in Skopostheorie. Taylor mainly employed the strategy of domesticationand his purpose was to make target language readers easily understand the allusions. Theanticipated readers were the western readers who knew little about China in the early yearsof20th century, so Taylor mainly adopted the methods of free translation, amplificationand omission which conformed to the rule of coherence in Skopostheorie. Both translatorsachieved the anticipated purpose of target language readers and realized cross-culturalcommunicative functions.