Research On The Chinese Translation Of English Inspirational Speeches On Campus In USA:a Skopos Approach

English inspirational speeches can inspire and refresh people, as is the essence of inspirational speeches. In America, inspirational speeches on campus have far-reaching influence on college students’ outlook on life, inspiring and enlightening them from time to time. Therefore, translation of English inspirational speeches on campus in USA as a medium is expected to have the same aim or purpose for Chinese college students.In order to better serve the need of translation, there must be appropriate theories to direct the translation action. The thesis, taking a descriptive way from the macro-level study to the micro-level study, presents the application of Skopos Theory in translation of English inspirational speeches (EIS) on campus in USA through integrating the macro-level translation Skopos and text function with the micro-level syntactic structures and lexical expressions.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One briefly introduces research background and research significance.The second chapter is the literature review of Skopos Theory. A detailed analysis of the principal concepts of Skopos Theory will be presented. The author highlights the three rules of Skopos Theory: Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. In the translation process, Skopos rule plays a decisive role, while coherence rule and fidelity rule are subordinate to Skopos rule. From the three rules comes the translation standard of Skopos Theory, i.e. the target text (TT) should be adequate, but may not be equivalent to source text (ST).In the third chapter, the author first discusses the concept of EIS and illustrates the main distinction between EIS and writing of other styles in view of text functions, and conducts a qualitative and quantitative analysis of different text types in EIS. Then, according to Reiss’s text typology, which classifies text into informative texts, expressive texts and operative texts according to different contents, forms and effect, EIS mainly belongs to operative ones with a core function to inspire and enlighten the audience or readers and also expressive ones since it shares literature flavor in language style.Chapter Four is the application of Skopos Theory in practice. the author devotes to conducting a qualitative and quantitative analysis of EIS translation in view of the three rules in Skopos Theory. In Chapter Five, the author probes into EIS translation by combining Skopos Theory and text typology theory and puts forward appropriate translation methods.In Chapter Six, the thesis comes to its conclusion, emphasizing the significance of applying Skopos Theory to EIS translation again, but it also points out that Skopos Theory needs to be improved and developed through practice.